AI At War: Killer Robots

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2023

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if we could take people completely out of the equation when planning military strikes? Lethal autonomous weapons systems use artificial intelligence to identify, select and kill human targets without human intervention. While with unmanned military drones, the decision to strike is made remotely by a human operator, in the case of lethal autonomous weapons the decision is made by algorithms. But how does this work, and what are the dangers of the proliferation of these weapons?

In this episode James is joined by Emilia Javorsky from the Future of Life Institute. Emilia takes us through the probabilities of a future with autonomous weapons, including the risks to our world and to the development of AI.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What if we could take people completely out of the equation when planning military strikes?
0:05.0	Does it sound like a good idea to remove humans from one side of war?
0:10.0	Lethal autonomous weapons systems use artificial intelligence to identify, select, and kill human targets without human intervention.
0:18.8	Take military drones, for example.
0:20.6	For now, the decision to strike is usually made by human operators.
0:25.0	Yet in the future lethal autonomous weapons may take the decision to kill a human without a human being in the loop of control to make that decision.
0:34.0	So this is robots computers taking the decision about whether or not a human should live or die.
0:40.0	According to one UN reports, not only does such technologies already exist, but they've already been deployed in battle.
0:47.0	So how does this technology work? And what are the dangers of these weapons spreading around the world?
0:52.0	Well, it's the Easter Holiday in the UK, so to find out, I've turned to an episode we were recorded with
0:56.4	Amelia Jervorski, an expert from the Future of Life Institute.
1:00.8	As you'll have seen last month, it was a Future of Life Institute who issued an important warning signed by Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniac about the perils of AI.
1:10.0	Together Amelia and I go through these worrying possibilities for our future and lay out some
1:16.0	of the technical details about autonomous weapons. Hi Amelia, welcome to the Warfare Podcast. How you doing today?
1:29.0	Thank you so much for having me James. I'm thrilled to be here.
1:32.0	Not a problem at all where are you
1:33.8	speaking to us from in the world so I am speaking to you from Chile Boston
1:38.7	Massachusetts so I'm on state side I'm not that far away from you and it is bizarrely chilly but when I arrived it was
1:45.7	super warm and then today it has gone snow sun snow sun and if you need a
1:51.3	reminder that climate change is in full swing, I think this is certainly it.
1:56.0	Indeed, yes, you need to be prepared to wear like one of those big puffer coats and sandals within the same trip.
2:02.4	You're not wrong. But when it comes to
	...

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