hasn't Ukraine already proved out autonomous weapons on the battlefield? There was a NYT podcast a couple years ago where the interviewed higher up in the Ukraine military and they said it's already in place with fpv drones, loitering, target identification, attack, the whole 9 yards.

You don't need an LLM to do autonomous weapons, a modern Tomahawk cruise missile is pretty autonomous. The only change to a modern tomahawk would be adding parameters of what the target looks like and tasking the missile with identifying a target. The missile pretty much does everything else already ( flying, routing, etc ).

The DoD was pursuing autonomous AI weapons decades ago, and succeeded as of 1979 with the Mk 60 Captor Mine.

https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...

The worries over Skynet and other sci-fi apocalypse scenarios are so silly.

If you ever doubted it you were fooling yourself. It is inevitable.

> Autonomous AI weapons is one of the things the DoD appears to be pursuing. So bring back the Skynet people, because that’s where we apparently are.

This situation legitimately worries me, but it isn't even really the SkyNet scenario that I am worried about.

To self-quote a reply to another thread I made recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145#47083641):

When AI dooms humanity it probably won't be because of the sort of malignant misalignment people worry about, but rather just some silly logic blunder combined with the system being directly in control of something it shouldn't have been given control over.

I think we have less to worry about from a future SkyNet-like AGI system than we do just a modern or near future LLM with all of its limitations making a very bad oopsie with significant real-world consequences because it was allowed to control a system capable of real-world damage.

I would have probably worried about this situation less in times past when I believed there were adults making these decisions and the "Secretary of War" of the US wasn't someone known primarily as an ego-driven TV host with a drinking problem.

It turned out that the Pentagon just ignored Anthropic's demands anyways: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used...

I really doubt that Anthropic is in any kind of position to make those decisions regardless of how they feel.

> Autonomous AI weapons

In theory, you can do this today, in your garage.

Buy a quad as a kit. (cheap)

Figure out how to arm it (the trivial part).

Grab yolo, tuned for people detection. Grab any of the off the shelf facial recognition libraries. You can mostly run this on phone hardware, and if you're stripping out the radios then possibly for days.

The shim you have to write: software to fly the drone into the person... and thats probably around somewhere out there as well.

The tech to build "Screamers" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(1995_film) ) already exists, is open source and can be very low power (see: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O_lz0b792ew ) --

I love this.

Another way of saying it: the problem we should be focused on is not how smart the AI is getting. The problem we should be focused on is how dumb people are getting (or have been for all of eternity) and how they will facilitate and block their own chance of survival.

That seems uniquely human but I'm not a ethnobiologist.

A corollary to that is that the only real chance for survival is that a plurality of humans need to have a baseline of understanding of these threats, or else the dumb majority will enable the entire eradication of humans.

Seems like a variation of Darwin's law, but I always thought that was for single examples. This is applied to the entirety of humanity.

Look, we’ve had nukes for almost 100 years now. Do you really think our ancient alien zookeepers are gonna let us wipe with AI? Semi /j

It's even worse than that.

The positives outcomes are structurally being closed. The race to the bottom means that you can't even profit from it.

Even if you release something that have plenty of positive aspects, it can and is immediately corrupted and turned against you.

At the same time you have created desperate people/companies and given them huge capabilities for very low cost and the necessity to stir things up.

So for every good door that someone open, it pushes ten other companies/people to either open random potentially bad doors or die.

Regulating is also out of the question because otherwise either people who don't respect regulations get ahead or the regulators win and we are under their control.

If you still see some positive door, I don't think sharing them would lead to good outcomes. But at the same time the bad doors are being shared and therefore enjoy network effects. There is some silent threshold which probably has already been crossed, which drastically change the sign of the expected return of the technology.

> Humans are inherently curious creatures.

You misspelled greedy.

It's not the general public who know nothing that develop and release software.

I am not specifically talking about this issue, but do remember that very little bad happens in the world without the active or even willing participation of engineers. We make the tools and structures.

X*

People excited by a new tech's possibilities aren't lunatics and psychos.

I am equally if not more grateful than HN is just as unrepresentative.

Isn't the Mac mini the container?

There is no scientific basis to expect that the current approach to AI involving LLMs could ever scale up to super intelligent AGI. Another major breakthrough will be needed first, possibly an entirely new hardware architecture. No one can predict when that will come or what it will look like.