How Skynet Is Likely To Happen
I’m not saying it WILL happen. I’m just saying how it is LIKELY to happen, IF indeed it does.
Reinforcement learning is coming up. It’s a cool-ass AI thing that allows you to beat video games, even against other human players.
It recently beat the world champion at Go, and the world champions of DOTA.
So, how does that apply to the real world?
Just like in video games, real-world units have stats and capabilities. Enter those into a computer, as well as the number of units per country. Let’s do the US vs some other country.
The computer will play millions of simulations against itself, and train itself to defeat any foe. It can literally do this in 4 hours.
Then, when battle time comes, we can transfer the model to the real world, and it can give us battle instructions far better than any human could. The enemy would have no chance of winning the war.
Wow! You think. Assured victory? How could there possibly be any downside to this???
Here’s the problem with that. Computer spits out battle plans, generals follow battle plans, generals win. However. Their war machine could be improved even MORE, and be even MORE effective, if they let a computer have direct control over every unit. That would save the time between printing out instructions, communicating them to the general, and the general communicating those instructions to each individual unit (I don’t know how war works).
So, the military powers that be say, we want the deadliest, most efficient military force in history. Let our Battle AI take the reins, it can coordinate millions of units at once in a perfect synchronization of effectiveness!
All of that is completely logical.
What happens next, though, when an artificial intelligence is given complete control of a powerful country’s military?
At current, we have no way for a machine to become self-aware. There aren’t even any well-researched, credible techniques for doing that. What if a technique comes along though?
Actually, even more likely, what if that military computer gets hacked? It wouldn’t take much, maybe even reverse the sign of a single number, and you are now fighting the deadliest machine the world has ever known.
Lots of potential, but lots of danger too. Just something to think about.
