Gun control? How about AI control?
Artificial Intelligence at the trigger?
Modern Artificial Intelligence is impressive, so is modern robotics and weapons technology, now mix them all together and what do you get? How about a whole new military arms race and new mind blowingly advanced equipment for law enforcement?
After my first experience with a self-driving car the possibilities that come to mind are limitless. (No hyperbole intended here.) There are now cars on the road which you can sit down in and verbally state your destination and it will take you there without your assistance. (Tesla S 90D in my experience) The self-driving car has always been one of those impossibly-futuristic-science-fiction things… no more. It's now science fact. It blows my mind to think of the programming required to make a vehicle able to make a left turn at a 4-way stoplight. (US right hand drive here.) It somehow “watches” the light and the on-coming cars, determines its order in the queue, watches for pedestrians, kids on skateboards, people pulling out of parking spots, …and somehow gets you there without any fresh blood on the bumper or dashboard.
Sci-fi movies and stories with robots and AI like
Terminator or
2001 A Space Odyssey or even
Star Wars, have brought some of the dark “what-if’s to light, but it has always been in a abstract fictional future kind of way. If you haven’t been keeping up on what is possible right here, right now in a galaxy not so far away, do some searches on “DARPA robotics”. Modern robots and their physical design now come in many forms. Some are anthropomorphic (sorry, big word! How about “humanoid”? lol.) but most are designed to be more practical for specific tasks. If you want to design an effective military robot which could carry and use all of the equipment of a modern soldier it probably would not look like C3PO. I imagine that it would look more like a cross between an antelope and a spider.
Now give that spidelope the “brains” of the self driving car, a weapon turret and a way of refueling in the field and you have something that no “armed militia” of any people would have a chance of standing up to… (let’s not go into the “what if they have a really good hacker?” thing here.) Oh, by the way, the Tesla comes with a smart phone app, you can communicate with it. I saw a lady in a store who left her dog in the car on a hot day. She had the car’s air-conditioned set and was watching the dog. She could tell the dog to go lay down in the back seat and it listened! Anyway, so instead of a soldier or a cop having a K9 partner….
Something on the order of the Droid Army of Star Wars is now possible. Will we soon be seeing AI-K9s with soldiers at airports and big events? Will the navy be made largely of landing craft for invasion droids? Some deployments could be crab/tarantula sized as individuals or in swarms… Many crazy things are not so far fetched any more.
There are some major concerns:
* On one hand there is a open letter which has been signed and is being promoted by the likes of Steven Hawking, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Steven Wozniac and many more with a grim warning:
www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
The BBC article in the link wrote:
“Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."
“We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it," he says.
But he is betting that AI is going to be a positive force.
Prof Hawking is not alone in fearing for the future.
* On the other hand; If we do end up with droid armies, how is the upper chain of command determined? Who has ultimate control? The US President is the Commander-In-Chief of the US military. How would seccession work? (passing of authority from one leader to the next) It could be a big problem if a private contractor had the ability to supersede executive order. Who else will end up with some sort of AI military capability? It might not take much to have something very dangerous.
I know, not enough pictures... Anyway, enjoy Dogfight! …and don’t be too surprised if part of elite’s beta testing includes an impassable AI anti-aircraft gun…