Future Imperfect #38: Literally killer robots
Welcome to Future Imperfect! This week I’ve been reading about lethal autonomous weapons systems (aka killer robots), AI asteroid defense programs, really scary economic graphs, and the case for giving kids unlimited screen time. Oh, and the worst governor in America.
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Literally killer robots
One more thing to add to the things you need to freak out about in the next couple of years: lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).
This isn’t a conversation about drones. By now, drone warfare has been normalized — at least 10 countries have them. Self-driving cars are tested in fleets. Twenty years ago, a computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess and, more recently, another taught itself how to beat humans at Go, a Chinese game of strategy that doesn’t rely as much on patterns and probability. In July, the Dallas police department sent a robot strapped with explosives to kill an active shooter following an attack on police officers during a protest.
But with LAWS, unlike the Dallas robot, the human sets the parameters of the attack without actually knowing the specific target. The weapon goes out, looks for anything within those parameters, hones in, and detonates. Examples that don’t sound entirely shit-your-pants-terrifying are things like all enemy ships in the South China Sea, all military radars in X country, all enemy tanks on the plains of Europe. But scale it up, add non-state actors, and you can envision strange permutations: all power stations, all schools, all hospitals, all fighting-age males carrying weapons, all fighting-age males wearing baseball caps, those with brown hair. Use your imagination.
While this sounds like the kind of horror you pay to see in theaters, killer robots will shortly be arriving at your front door for free courtesy of Russia, China, or the US, all of which are racing to develop them. “There are really no technological breakthroughs that are required,” Russell, the computer science professor, told me. “Every one of the component technology is available in some form commercially … It’s really a matter of just how much resources are invested in it.”
Why does this matter? All right, get your Robocop, Iron Man, and Skynet jokes out of the way. For real though, it’s easy to see broad targeting sets create unintended collateral damage. If humans still can’t get this right, why do we assume that autonomous robots are going to be any better?
I can’t see an ethical justification at the moment for permitting LAWS where humans are completely out of the loop, and per the article, I’d expect the U.N. to step in and ban those systems.
A critical nuance though: this would only ban LAWS use by the world’s militaries—police forces would be exempt. If you have any reservations about the use of force in today’s police departments, then you should pay particular attention here.
AI defense systems
Can AI save us from an extinction-level event? That’s what NASA’s Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is trying to figure out (via How We Get To Next).
Even if we don’t know when it’ll happen, a large asteroid will eventually collide with Earth — we know that because we’ve been tracking a lot of them for more than a decade. In the 1990s, NASA began focusing on so-called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) in response to a growing realization that anything could hit us, at any time, without much warning. Any object that comes within 0.3 AU of Earth gets classed as an NEO, and rated for risk accordingly…
NASA currently estimates that fewer than 10 percent of NEOs smaller than 1,000 feet [300 meters], and less than one percent of those smaller than 330 feet [100 meters], are known. Those smaller objects, those “city-killers,” are the focus of NASA’s Grand Asteroid Challenge, which prompted the creation of the FDL.
“[It] was established to do two things,” said Parr. “Firstly, apply machine learning techniques and technologies to the challenge of Planetary Defense — specifically, PHAs or Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. Secondly, to demonstrate a platform where significant breakthroughs could be ‘industrialized’ over an accelerated timeframe, in a way that is useful for America’s space program.”
Why does this matter? Here’s a great use of AI: Help scientists process far more information (potential NEOs in space) than they could otherwise sift through. Now we just need an official Armageddon plan.
The elephant graveyard
Have you seen the elephant graph? You’ve probably seen it discussed in the context of the impact of globalization on global income growth, but that’s not the whole story. Kaila Colbin shares the real reason why that graph is so scary.
One of the main points I am there to make is that the thing that is increasing exponentially is the price-performance of technology.
The shock-and-awe headlines about the artificially intelligent lawyer et al relate to the performance side of the price-performance equation: machine learning has now gotten so good a robot can do your job, Ms. Knowledge Worker.
But the Foxconn headline? The 60,000 workers replaced by robots? That’s the price side of the price-performance equation, and it’s a lot scarier.
Technology has gotten so cheap that it is now more economically viable to buy robots than it is to pay people $5 a day…
We need to be thinking hard, now, about technological unemployment. About the fact that while technology provides benefits to billions, the economic gains tend to be concentrated for a few. About the fact that we made up the idea of a job in the first place.
This is not a task for a small group of intellectual elites. This needs to be a collective conversation, from first principles: What should our global socioeconomic system look like?
Why does this matter? There are a whole lot of economic issues that boil down into this, so it’s hard to pull out any one thing. Suffice it to say, that this is linked in some fashion to the rise of Western populism, Trump in particular.
All screens, all the time
In an excerpt from his new book, Wasting Time on the Internet, Kenneth Goldsmith makes the case for unlimited screen time for children and teenagers.
Our cameras — first clumsy digital cameras and now smartphones — have been a constant presence in their life, documenting their every move. We never took just one picture of them but took dozens in rapid-fire fashion, off-loaded them to the computer, and never deleted a single one. Now, when I open my iPhoto album to show them their baby pictures, the albums look like Andy Warhol paintings, with the same images in slight variations repeated over and over, as we documented them second by second. Clearly we have created this situation.
There is no road map for this territory. They are making it up as they go along. But there’s no way that this evening could be considered asocial or antisocial. Their imaginations are on full throttle and are wildly engaged in what they’re doing. They are highly connected and interacting with each other, but in ways that are pretty much unrecognizable to me.
I’m struggling to figure out what’s so bad about this. I’m reading that screen addiction is taking a terrible toll on our children, but in their world it’s not so much an addiction as a necessity. Many key aspects of our children’s lives are in some way funneled through their devices. From online homework assignments to research prompts, right on down to where and when soccer practice is going to be held, the information comes to them via their devices.
Why does this matter? These are the true digital natives. If these kids are going to judged by their digital acumen when they reach adulthood, could parents who ban their use just end up hurting their kids’ education and career prospects down the road? I bet yes.
You can’t take the Cloud from me
Today’s sci-fi short: Lost Memories 2.0, by François Ferracci (French, with English subtitles).
The “Cloud” collapsed and destroyed all the digital data in the world a few years ago in an electromagnetic storm. Since that monumental moment, the world has been slowly recovering, AD is now AC “After Cloud”. The “Cloud” has slowly been reactivated and interfaces revived. Marc goes in search of Karen, his wife, lover, partner, and best friend before the fall of the “Cloud” and now his lost love.
GIF of the Week: Goats!
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