{"id":1442990,"date":"2023-12-09T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-09T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1442990"},"modified":"2023-12-09T02:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-12-09T07:00:00","slug":"the-pentagons-rush-to-deploy-ai-enabled-weapons-is-going-to-kill-us-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/the-pentagons-rush-to-deploy-ai-enabled-weapons-is-going-to-kill-us-all\/1442990\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pentagon’s Rush To Deploy AI-Enabled Weapons Is Going To Kill Us All"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pentagon’s Rush To Deploy AI-Enabled Weapons Is Going To Kill Us All<\/span><\/p>\n

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Authored by Michael T. Klare via The Nation,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

While experts warn about the risk of human extinction, the Department of Defense plows full speed ahead…<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The recent boardroom drama over the leadership of OpenAI\u2014the San Francisco\u2013based tech startup behind the immensely popular ChatGPT computer program\u2014has been described as a corporate power struggle, an ego-driven personality clash, and a strategic dispute over the release of more capable ChatGPT variants. It was all that and more, but at heart represented an unusually bitter fight between those company officials who favor unrestricted research on advanced forms of artificial intelligence (AI) and those who, fearing the potentially catastrophic outcomes of such endeavors, sought to slow the pace of\u00a0AI development<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At approximately the same time as this epochal battle was getting under way, a similar struggle was unfolding at the United Nations in New York and government offices in Washington, D.C., over the development of autonomous weapons systems\u2014drone ships, planes, and tanks operated by AI rather than humans. In this contest, a broad coalition of diplomats and human rights activists have sought to impose a legally binding ban on such devices\u2014called \u201ckiller robots\u201d by opponents\u2014while officials at the Departments of State and Defense have argued for their rapid development.<\/p>\n

At issue in both sets of disputes are competing views over the trustworthiness of advanced forms of AI, especially the \u201clarge language models\u201d used in \u201cgenerative AI\u201d systems like ChatGPT. (Programs like these are called \u201cgenerative\u201d because they can create human-quality text or images based on a statistical analysis of data culled from the Internet). Those who favor the development and application of advanced AI\u2014whether in the private sector or the military\u2014claim that such systems can be developed safely; those who caution against such action, say it cannot, at least not without substantial safeguards.<\/p>\n

Without going into the specifics of the OpenAI drama\u2014which ended, for the time being, on November 21 with the appointment of new board members and the return of AI whiz Sam Altman as chief executive after being fired five days earlier\u2014it is evident that the crisis was triggered by concerns among members of the original board of directors that Altman and his staff were veering too far in the direction of rapid AI development, despite\u00a0pledges<\/a>\u00a0to exercise greater caution.<\/p>\n

As Altman and many of his colleagues see things, humans technicians are on the verge of creating \u201cgeneral AI\u201d or \u201csuperintelligence\u201d\u2014AI programs so powerful they can duplicate all aspects of human cognition and program themselves, making human programming unnecessary. Such systems, it is claimed, will be able to cure most human diseases and perform other beneficial miracles\u2014but also, detractors warn, will eliminate most human jobs and may, eventually, choose to eliminate humans altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn terms of both potential upsides and downsides, superintelligence will be more powerful than other technologies humanity has had to contend with in the past,\u201d <\/strong><\/em>Altman and his top lieutenants\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in May. \u201cWe can have a dramatically more prosperous future; but we have to manage risk to get there.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

For Altman, as for many others in the AI field, that risk has an \u201cexistential\u201d dimension, entailing the possible collapse of human civilization\u2014and, at the extreme, human extinction. \u201cI think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong,\u201d he\u00a0told a Senate hearing<\/a>\u00a0on May 16. Altman also signed an\u00a0open letter<\/a>\u00a0released by the Center for AI Safety on May 30 warning of the possible \u201crisk of extinction from AI.\u201d Mitigating that risk, the letter avowed, \u201cshould be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Altman and other top AI officials believe that superintelligence can, and should be pursued, so long as adequate safeguards are installed along the way. \u201cWe believe that the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks, but ensuring their safety is vital to our work,\u201d\u00a0he told the Senate subcommittee<\/a>\u00a0on privacy, technology and the law.<\/p>\n

Washington Promotes the \u201cResponsible\u201d Use of AI in Warfare<\/h2>\n

A similar calculus regarding the exploitation of advanced AI governs the outlook of senior officials at the Departments of State and Defense, who argue that artificial intelligence can and should be used to operate future weapons systems\u2014so long as it is done so in a \u201cresponsible\u201d manner.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot predict how AI technologies will evolve or what they might be capable of in a year or five years,\u201d Amb. Bonnie Jenkins, under secretary of state for arms control and nonproliferation,\u00a0declared<\/a>\u00a0at a Nov. 13 UN presentation. Nevertheless, she noted, the United States was determined to \u201cput in place the necessary policies and to build the technical capacities to enable responsible development and use [of AI by the military], no matter the technological advancements.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jenkins was at the UN that day to unveil a \u201cPolitical Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy,\u201d a US-inspired call for voluntary restraints on the development and deployment of AI-enabled autonomous weapons. The\u00a0declaration avows<\/a>, among other things, that \u201cStates should ensure that the safety, security, and effectiveness of military AI capabilities are subject to appropriate and rigorous testing,\u201d and that \u201cStates should implement appropriate safeguards to mitigate risks of failures in military AI capabilities, such as the ability to\u2026 deactivat[e] deployed systems, when such systems demonstrate unintended behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this, however, constitutes a legally binding\u00a0obligation<\/em>\u00a0of states that sign the declaration; rather, it simply entails a promise to abide by a set of best practices, with no requirement to demonstrate compliance with those measures or risk of punishment if found to be in non-compliance.<\/p>\n

Although several dozen countries\u2014mostly close allies of the United States\u2014have signed the declaration, many other nations, including Austria, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain, insist that voluntary compliance with a set of US-designed standards is insufficient to protect against the dangers posed by the deployment of AI-enabled weapons. Instead, they seek a legally binding instrument setting strict limits on the use of such systems or banning them altogether. For these actors, the risks of such weapons \u201cgoing rogue,\u201d and conducting unauthorized attacks on civilians, is simply too great to allow their use in combat.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumanity is about to cross a major threshold of profound importance when the decision over life and death is no longer taken by humans but made on the basis of pre-programmed algorithms. This raises fundamental ethical issues,\u201d <\/strong><\/em>Amb. Alexander Kmentt, Austria\u2019s chief negotiator for disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation, told\u00a0The Nation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

For years, Austria and a slew of Latin American countries have\u00a0sought to impose a ban on such weapons<\/a>\u00a0under the aegis of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a 1980 UN treaty that aims to restrict or prohibit weapons deemed to cause unnecessary suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately. These countries, along with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other non-governmental organizations, claim that fully autonomous weapons fall under this category as they will prove incapable of distinguishing between combatants and civilians in the heat of battle, as required by international law. Although a majority of parties to the CCW appear to share this view and favor tough controls on autonomous weapons, decisions by signatory states is made by consensus and a handful of countries, including Israel, Russia, and the United States, have used their veto power to block adoption\u00a0of any such measure<\/a>. This, in turn, has led advocates of regulation to turn to the UN General Assembly\u2014where decisions are made by majority vote rather than consensus\u2014as an arena for future progress on the issue.<\/p>\n

On October 12, for the first time ever, the General Assembly\u2019s First Committee\u2014responsible for peace, international security, and disarmament\u2014addressed the dangers posed by autonomous weapons, voting by a wide majority\u2014164 to 5 (with 8 abstentions)\u2014to instruct the secretary-general to conduct a comprehensive study of the matter. The study, to be completed in time for the next session of the General Assembly (in fall 2024), is to examine the \u201cchallenges and concerns\u201d such weapons raise \u201cfrom humanitarian, legal, security, technological, and ethical perspectives and on the role of humans in the use of force.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the UN measure does not impose any binding limitations on the development or use of autonomous weapons systems, it lays the groundwork for the future adoption of such measures, by identifying a range of concerns over their deployment and by insisting that the secretary-general, when conducting the required report, investigate those dangers in detail, including by seeking the views and expertise of scientists and civil society organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe objective is obviously to move forward on regulating autonomous weapons systems,\u201d <\/strong><\/em>Ambassador Kmentt indicated. \u201cThe resolution makes it clear that the overwhelming majority of states want to address this issue with urgency.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What will occur at next year\u2019s General Assembly meeting cannot be foretold, but if Kmentt is right, we can expect a much more spirited international debate over the advisability of allowing the deployment of AI-enabled weapons systems\u2014whether or not participants have agreed to the voluntary measures being championed by the United States.<\/p>\n

At the Pentagon, It\u2019s Full Speed Ahead<\/h2>\n

For officials at the Department of Defense, however, the matter is largely settled: the United States will proceed with the rapid development and deployment of numerous types of AI-enabled autonomous weapons systems. This was made evident on August 28, with the announcement of the \u201cReplicator\u201d initiative by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.<\/p>\n

Noting that the United States must prepare for a possible war with China\u2019s military, the People\u2019s Liberation Army (PLA), in the not-too-distant future, and that US forces cannot match the PLA\u2019s weapons inventories on an item-by-item basis (tank-for-tank, ship-for-ship, etc.), Hicks argued that the US must be prepared to overcome China\u2019s superiority in conventional measures of power\u2014its military \u201cmass\u201d\u2014by deploying \u201cmultitude thousands\u201d of autonomous weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo stay ahead, we\u2019re going to create a new state of the art\u2014just as America has before\u2014leveraging attritable [i.e., disposable], autonomous systems in all domains,\u201d<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0she told<\/a>\u00a0corporate executives at a National Defense Industrial Association meeting in Washington. \u201cWe\u2019ll counter the PLA\u2019s mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.\u201d<\/p>\n

In\u00a0a follow-up speech<\/a>, delivered on September 6, Hicks provided (slightly) more detail on what she called all-domain attritable autonomous (ADA2) weapons systems. \u201cImagine distributed pods of self-propelled ADA2 systems afloat\u2026packed with sensors aplenty\u2026. Imagine fleets of ground-based ADA2 systems delivering novel logistics support, scouting ahead to keep troops safe\u2026. Imagine flocks of [aerial] ADA2 systems, flying at all sorts of altitudes, doing a range of missions, building on what we\u2019ve seen in Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n

As per official guidance, Hicks assured her audience that all these systems \u201cwill be developed and fielded in line with our responsible and ethical approach to AI and autonomous systems.\u201d But except for that one-line one nod to safety, all the emphasis in her talks was on smashing bureaucratic bottlenecks in order to speed the development and deployment of autonomous weapons. \u201cIf [these bottlenecks] aren\u2019t tackled,\u201d\u00a0she declared<\/a>\u00a0on August 28, \u201cour gears will still grind too slowly, and our innovation engines still won\u2019t run at the speed and scale we need. And that, we cannot abide.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, the powers that be\u2014in both Silicon Valley and Washington\u2014have made the decision to proceed with the development and utilization of even more advanced versions of artificial intelligence despite warnings from scientists and diplomats that the safety of these programs cannot be assured and that their misuse could have catastrophic consequences. Unless greater effort is made to slow these endeavors, we may well discover what those consequences might entail.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 12\/08\/2023 – 21:00<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/military\/pentagons-rush-deploy-ai-enabled-weapons-going-kill-us-all<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pentagon’s Rush To Deploy AI-Enabled Weapons Is Going To Kill Us All Authored by Michael T. Klare via The Nation, While experts warn about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1442990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1442990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1442990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1442990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1442990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}