78K views · Jun 13, 2013 · 13:21 · 3 HN recommenders · 6 mentions · discussed 2013–2025
Novelist Daniel Suarez warns in a TED talk about autonomous robotic weapons and drones. He argues that taking the decision to kill out of human hands threatens democratic accountability and calls for a ban.
Why Hacker News points people here: Plugged repeatedly in AI and drone threads as a concise statement of the dangers of automated weapons.
“I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book”HN comment, 2025
“I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book”
Talk on the ramifications of automated weapons.
There's likely a slippery slope fallacy in there somewhere (I hope). If interested in the (not so) sci-fi aspects of automated weapons and their ramifications, I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book: this video
Talk on why militaries will want autonomous drones and the need for a ban.
This is only going to get worse if they make drones autonomous, which this TED talk shows they have a lot of reasons for why they will want to make them autonomous, unless there's huge public outcry demanding a ban: this video
“Relevant talk by Daniel Suarez”
Talk on dangers of governments deploying autonomous killer robots.
When you see governments already contemplating killing people based on algorithms, you begin to empathize with Musk about calling AI a "demon" that we're summoning: link However right now I'm much more afraid of governments "setting loose" autonomous killer robots than I am about Skynet-like self-conscious killer robots (which may be what Musk is thinking about). To the people being on the receiving end of the autonomous killer robots' missiles, it won't be much difference, though. They would already be living a "Terminator-like" future, where they have to "fight the machines". Relevant talk by Daniel Suarez: this video
“Ted Talk by Daniel Suarez (author of Daemon and Freedom) on the drone threat”
TED talk on the threat of autonomous drones.
There's a lot wrong with that article. If the computer is smart enough to tell you what to do in social situations and can also read, write, and drive cars, the game is pretty much up. There will be nothing humans can do that computers can't. The best thing to do will be to plug everyone in to the Matrix, because otherwise millions of wars between people with really smart computers will break out. Wars that will feature weapons designed by smart computers i.e. drones with nuclear/chemical/biological weapons - deadly enough to kill everyone. The safest route for humans in the coming years is for global scale cooperation to create a basic income, not a stipend, but self-contained self-sufficient virtual reality simulator so that we don't descend into chaos when some of us get access to hyper-intelligent computers. It's quaint that the good professor thinks we'll just go on seeking jobs after taking coursera courses, and marketing sales letters to each other, but we hackers unfortunately know that that isn't an accurate prediction. The gravitas of the situation is far greater. edit: Ted Talk by Daniel Suarez (author of Daemon and Freedom) on the drone threat this video
What might happen is what I heard recently being called the "morality apocalypse" [1], i.e. technology is improving so fast, but we're not going to use it properly, probably not unlike when US used the atomic bomb on Japan the first time. It was a time when discovering the atomic bomb surpassed our morality by a long shot, and it took quite a few decades for our morality to catch-up to the technology, and understand that countries must not use atomic bombs against each other. I fear the same will happen when we start using autonomous killer robots [2] (whether drones, or real Terminator-like robots), or when we learn how to make killer mosquito-sized drones that can assassinate anyone in the world anonymously, or when we learn how to use nanotechnology as a weapon. I think NSA doing mass surveillance of the whole planet "just because they can", also fits in this category. I welcome all such neutral technological progress since I'm not a Luddite, but I also fear our governments hungry for more power or protecting their power and influence will use these technologies nefariously, probably long before we find out about them, in secret. And even if they get public, I fear most people will be too complacent to it, and won't revolt too much against it (US still keeps Guantanamo open, for how many years now? It's not a matter of technology, but the same point applies). [1] - link [2] - this video link
Jacob Appelbaum has been saying this for a while already. They use NSA's data to do "signature strikes", i.e. strikes where they may assassinate someone only based on the "harmless metadata" they have on him. Talked to someone who may have talked to someone else from a "terrorist organization"? Well, you may now be on a drone target list. This is going to get exponentially worse as they move to automated drone assassinations, where they just create an "algorithm" that's supposed to decide who is going to die next. This is going to be their next logical conclusion, and to them it's "inevitable". Of course, it will be done in secret, too, probably for years before there are even leaks about it. Going by how "accurate" their algorithms are for determining who's American and who's not (there has to be only a 51 percent chance, which is almost like flipping a coin on whether someone is American or not), I imagine this algorithm on who to kill will be pretty loose, too. Better safe and kill more innocent people, than sorry and not kill the right target, is what they will choose for that algorithm. You could say the rules for killing are already very loose right now, but the killing itself is done manually, and they are somewhat restricted to how many people they can hire for this. Once it's automated, expect the assassinations to rise by an order of magnitude, because it will just be "so easy", and also sending a drone should become much cheaper in 10 years. Drone assassination def
