Oof. "Price per perp" is so perfectly aligned with LinkedIn writing style I'm surprised I hadn't seen it already.

you got me checking my calendar app

I think the difference between a targeting a specific piece of military hardware compared to training an AI model to target humans and infrastructure is quite different. This explains why drones that get misdirected will target oil infrastructure in friendly countries.

> but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.

Directional anti-tank mines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine

I think autonomous drone mentioned in the article used some sort of "kill all targets" mode indiscriminently much like traditional munitions.

In the article there's no mention on the targeting works, self guided munitions have machines as targets, usually. A drone by itself might kill civilians and even allies if ot misidentifies a person or animal.

Anti ship missiles also need to search for targets once in the area

Check the reality https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/s/YW1ldcsYwF

That area is a wasteland . No one lives walk there among civilians with a rare exception more over drive. You probably do not understand what Russia turned these areas to. It was the most populated area in Ukraine . Now it’s an empty land .

It's nice to have the luxury of deciding which of the horrible choices Ukrainians face are war crimes. But by that measure, a Grad MLRS is just as much of a war crime. Everything in the grid square it obliterates will also be dead.

(For those who don't know, the Grad is the most produced MLRS ever, and the Russian army's weapon of choice for indiscriminately bombarding enemy territory)

> like landmines

Boy do I have news for you about the use of landmines in the Ukraine war…

There is nothing but valid targets in those zones. Not different from sending a cruise missile on a military base killing everything there.

What do you think is the definition of “war crime?”

Landmines are not illegal, except for signatories of the Ottawa Treaty.

It would be my hope that unlike landmines, these might have a remote off switch/signal that can disable them after the war ends. At the very least, the battery will die and it won't fly around anymore.

>This is a clear war crime.

Sure, but does the battlefield have any war crime police on site to enforce those laws? Because without enforcement and punishment, all laws written by man are just fake and meaningless pieces of paper. The only laws that are actually real and non-optional are the law of gravity and such.

The war crime laws were invented as a legal theater for victorious powers to persecute the losers after WW2 with a veneer of legality, for imperialist superpowers to bully the small third countries who refuse to play ball, not for something superpowers to actually abide by themselves.

Because otherwise you could prosecute thousands of western/US personnel and their leaders under the same laws they prosecuted nazi soldiers at Nuremberg for what they did in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc but you're not gonna see that because the US didn't get conquered to have its soldiers and leaders dragged to court. US even has a law that allows it to invade the Hague if its soldiers are ever to be taken to trial there for war crimes. That tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy and double standards of "war crime" laws. And same thing will happen to Israel, Netanyahu and other war criminals there.

The reality in the real worlds, is that 'might makes right' trumps the geneva convention and war crime laws. Whoever ends up holding the guns on top of the rubble pile is the one making the rules that everyone else is forced to abide by. That's why the US is forced to constantly outspends all other militaries on the planet combined, to ensure they're the ones writing and enforcing international laws, and never ending up in the position to be held accountable by others, because they know that if they ever do, there's a laundry list of receipts waiting for them.

Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics was based on automated killing — which he beautifully disavowed in peacetime [1]. Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).

[1] “A Scientist Rebels,” 1947 http://lanl-the-back-story.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-scientist-...

I think the line is even fuzzier than you've described. Drones are very much analogous to missiles and torpedoes. Torpedoes have long been used in sea mines, and 'automatically' activated upon detection of acoustic or magnetic signature match.

I'm not sure I'd consider a trap an "autonomous weapon". The trap cannot select a target. It will go off for anyone unlucky enough to step in its trigger.

An autonomous drone will select a target and pull the trigger. It fills in the position of a human pulling a trigger, which is a decision.

Maybe if robots began deciding where to lay mines, i could hand it to you.

And who is held responsible when they hallucinate and say, kill the wrong person or mistake a playground for a battlefield?

Autonomous drones are much more precise, thus safer for non-combatants, than land mines (which kills for decades after a war), shells, missiles, guided bombs, etc.

Big "an AR 15 is just an automatic bow which is basically a spear thrower which is basically a knife which his basically a punch so nothing matters anyways" vibe

Not any difference from sending a cruise missile into a hospital killing every patient or every child in a school. The people giving the order to press the button and the people pressing the button can be liable for war crimes (can be because killing civilians by accident isn’t necessarily a war crime or even having collateral civilian causalities).

Seems to me like every single person who enabled the process should be held partially responsible, with whoever gave the final approval holding the largest portion of that responsibility.

It doesn't mean anything new. The country or entity that deployed them is responsible for their behavior.

Whether any particular country or entity can be held responsible is another question.

Imagine sanctions killing a million civilians due to insufficient medical care. Imagine firebombing Tokyo. Imagine dropping a nuclear bomb on a city full of civilians. Imagine genociding Palestinians. Imagine bombing a girl's school, killing hundreds.

Who's responsible, AI or a human? That misses the point that noone seems to be responsible at all, even in democracies.

> Something like a proximity mine from a video game.

Or real life. See:

Mark 60 CAPTOR (1979)

General Dynamics MEDUSA/Hammerhead (now)

It's not the first time.

Arguably the V-2 was fully autonomous as well. It was just indiscriminate.

> They're fighting for their country's existence. I would use every weapon in my disposal; and I'm a pacifist who hates violence.

I'm not sure it's accurate to define yourself as a pacifist if you believe safeguarding the concept of a nation-state is more important than human life, ethics, or the downstream effects of using "every weapon at your disposal".

I don't think you realize the creativity and variety we humans have put to use when designing weapons. If you can imagine a biological, chemical, radiation, concussive, or other weapon, it's been worked on. There has been more than one project to build a "world-ending weapon" and go way beyond the MAD theory.

> If Ukraine could deploy actual Terminator robots to the front line it would do it in a heartbeat.

Completely false. They are beholden to their allies. Ukraine could also reach Moscow with missiles, why doesn't it? It could build a nuclear bomb in 6 months, if not 6 weeks, they have the capabilities, why doesn't it? It's not so simple.

You are misinformed. Ukraine is used as cannon fodder by western institutions. You talk about Ukraine taking decisions. I can tell you that the normal Joe in Ukraine is completely sidelined in decisions. The whole country is controlled by foreign powers. A lot of western people call this Russian propoganda. They can't see that their own governments are at the wrong side of history. In the meantime it's hypocritical behavior is visible all over the world.

It flies to a defined kill zone and targets everything there.

> The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets.

> “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”

> Carpet bombing of cities, towns, villages or other areas containing a concentration of protected civilians has been considered a war crime since 1977, through Article 51 of Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpet_bombing

Autonomous weapons have hardly been deployed yet, maybe at the Inner Korean border or some lunatic's backyard. Therefore I don't think there is any legislation for it yet. But it seems a very cruel way of killing, also considering in this particular case they didn't even send footage back. What kind of experiment was this? Maybe they didn't like to see the brutality, perhaps people begging for mercy not to be killed, giving up and showing a white flag. Indeed this isn't possible with carpet-bombing.

I can kill you by having a B-52 level the entire downtown area where you work.

Or, I can have a drone with an LPR slam a mortar round into your car as you drive.

Because the targeting in that case was done by a human.

The early Ukraine war FPV drones were armed with warheads from lightweight anti-tank weapons, like the RPG-7:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7#Ammunition

The newer drones may have dedicated warhead designs now, but the concept is similar. They carry high explosive warheads that aren't sold to civilians. It's the same reason the militias don't already have anti-tank weapons.

I've thought about a parallel version of this since I was a child and learned about the existence of nuclear weapons being a 'nation state' level of difficulty. Over time I assume an individual will wield more destructive power. How long before any individual person can conjure up world-ending munitions?

At some point we just have to accept that we live in a society that relies heavily on trust and care for each other.

I don't think it is about technology - a camera module with NPU running YOLO can be had for like $30 from AliExpress. And a lot of other technological weapons is possible on a cheap, yet nor Russia, nor Ukraine are doing it.

In case of autonomous drones i don't see them bringing any noticeable benefit over FPV until they are deployed in the numbers an order or two of magnitude larger. Both countries seem yet to reach such number of drones. And the large task here isn't just mere production of the drones, it is the whole system of delivery/deployment/management of those large hives of autonomous drones which also needs to be developed/implemented.

If my time playing Pokémon Go is any help, I can just bounce around and dodge the balls the drone lobs at me as it tries to swipe its screen just right, until it inevitably runs out of balls. If a ball sucks me in, I can just wiggle around once or twice and break free, causing the drone to waste more resources on subsequent attempts.

I think we'll be ok.

"Kill everyone in the area" is probably the least harmful for the reason described.

It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.

> Why is the latter worse than the former ?

I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.

That's vs. 10 quadcopter drones.

They can both be bad.

One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.

"No quarter" is a war crime.

Why does it have to be? Did bombs make guns obsolete?

If a military can bomb you or drone you, it will bomb you and drone you.

One way is that selective killing is more useful and therefore desirable. For example consider the classic slaughterbot video. It's plausible that someone capable might want to kill all democratic senators. It's much less likely that someone capable will want to kill all of them with a massive bomb.

People can be held accountable for war crimes. That's why they are less willing to commit them and obey orders blindly.

Ai is like 8yr old with gun: unpredictable

Willingness to play.

It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.

Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.

Seriously, what sort of fuckwit downvoted this ?

The difference is that in those systems a human chose the target. Here, an AI does.

> but humans are more likely to make this kind of mistake more than a computer or AI model

Based on?