Respect for sticking to your beliefs. Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons? I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets, seems irresponsible to not... Is a dumb sea mine that blows up everything somehow better than a smart sea mine that knows to not blow up sometimes?

"You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"

I realize that's not a great argument and was definitely tongue-in-cheek, but given there's still a lot of debate about the accuracy of AI for far more mundane tasks, my personal perspective is that until we have LLMs and such that are truly, demonstrably far more accurate than humans, with true reasoning and judgement capabilities, they don't belong where lives are at stake.

I wouldn't want an LLM-underpinned machine running anesthesia during a surgery; why would I want an LLM-underpinned military apparatus that is deciding the lives of far more? I wouldn't, not in their current state.

In a hypothetical future where we truly trust incredibly smart AIs or LLMs or whatever "smart" technology it is for driving weaponry, okay - if it's truly necessary; I abhor war and the death and destruction wrought by it.

In my mind, though - even if we get to that future where there's some vastly superior technology to the LLMs we have today, which can judge and reason, then I'll have a bunch of other questions, like understanding the motivations of said technology, because I suspect it'll be something much closer to AGI, and that opens a whole separate can of philosophical worms.

> Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons?

Because the minute you defer decision making to a machine you eliminate human accountability.

Any time the robot is used to do something illegal or immoral, you can just say "it was a bug" or "that's not what I really meant". It enables plausible deniability.

We see this every time AI is allowed to make decisions. That robot promoted violent extremism in your feed? It misidentified a black man? It disproportionately chose men in hiring decisions? shrug Its the algorithm. Who can argue with the algorithm?

Likewise any attempt to codify liability is typically avoided at all costs because the purpose of those systems is what they do.

Mainly I don't want them because I don't want a machine instantly making life or death judgements. It might be fine if it mostly informs a human who ultimately pulls the trigger, but having that failsafe is important in keeping machines from going on killing sprees.

I also want people to be held accountable when they do unjustified killings. AI weapons make it FAR too easy to simply pass off a killing as a "woopsie doodle." It's just not acceptable to say "The algorithm made a mistake, version 23 will do better".

I don't have a problem with the AI providing additional information to it's user, but when that's incorporated into a weapon it's a short distance from that to completely automating the killing.

That's why I'm completely against AI weapons.

> I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets,

Has this been proven to actually occur? There have been lots of reports that similar systems in Israel that use AI, struck hundreds of targets that were civilian. They did not discriminate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

A regime can only be as oppressive as the people following its orders. There are only so many protestors you can order your army to kill until your troops realize they are killing their own friends and family, at that point they either desert or turn their guns against you. This puts a check on what even the most evil tyrants can do. Not a perfect one, for sure, but still better than nothing.

Technology changes this by reducing the human involvement needed in killing. The Nazi gas chambers were a historical example — it turned out mowing down innocent civilians with machine guns was too mentally taxing for even devoted Nazis, so they invented a bloodless industrialized process where they can kill with greater efficiency while also sheltering the killer from the immediate effects of his actions. A win win for the Nazis, not so much for its victims.

Autonomous weapons are dangerous for this exact reason. They bypass individual moral decisions entirely. They are the perfect "just following orders" machine. They allow a small concentration of powerful people to impose force upon the populace without ever having to fear their own soldiers. It tips the balance of power massively in favor of those already powerful.

> Is a dumb sea mine that blows up everything somehow better than a smart sea mine that knows to not blow up sometimes?

Yes. If smart mines lead to belligerents laying more of them because they're "safer."

It’s true that humans are unreliable, even if we could guarantee a consistent set of moral and ethical standards as well as the appropriate tools and authority to enforce them at all times. We do, however, have to deal with 100% of the implications, one way or another. Machines don’t. Vasily Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov had to consider the world they would condemn their children to if they pushed the button, the missiles didn’t. These are imperfect devices made by imperfect beings, whose rules and goals can be changed more or less at will by whomever wields them. Offloading the responsibility of pulling a trigger or trampling someone’s legal or human rights to such a machine while insulating those in command from consequences threatens to make things worse at a speed and scale I don’t think we’ve seen before in all of our dark history. Meanwhile, it further concentrates immense and unchecked power in the hands of a relative scant handful of elites, all of whom exhibit the lack of ethical and moral fiber we were talking about to begin with.

Teaching something or someone to pull a trigger is trivial compared to teaching them not to. I have no reason to believe that automated weapons and surveillance will be more reliable than our world leaders or that the world will be safer with them in it.

>Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons?

When the decision to kill another human being is made that should be in the hands of a directly accountable other human being, not an unaccountable machine developed in the basement of a private corporation.

And mines, both dumb and smart, in particular anti-personell mines are banned by the Ottawa treaty ratified by 162 countries. It's exactly the autonomous and fundamentally uncontrollable nature of mines, not just that they're dumb, that has produced countless of casualties long after wars were over. Can you tell me that millions of autonomous loitering munitions are not going to end up exactly like those mines still blowing legs off people decades after conflicts are over? And who is responsible then?

They aren’t training smart AI weapons to discriminate between civilians and soldiers. Even so, what happens when the soldiers are disguised as civilians? Or when the enemy forces civilians to serve or be a decoy?

Because it's going to be used in any possible way, and certainly not for the good of the people, as imply in your "naive" false dichotomy.