This is part of the ACE program [0] where a human pilot will control a number of drones. Sensors in each drone will give the pilot more information and longer range sensors, and the human pilot will use that info to direct the drones to engage certain targets.
For example, using long range radar the pilot selects several enemy jets, and directs the drones to engage those jets. Or the pilot can direct a drone to go ahead of his formation to penetrate hostile air space and collect data he can use to decide next steps.
ACE creates a hierarchical framework for autonomy in which higher-level cognitive functions (e.g., developing an overall engagement strategy, selecting and prioritizing targets, determining best weapon or effect, etc.) may be performed by a human, while lower-level functions (i.e., details of aircraft maneuver and engagement tactics) is left to the autonomous system.[0]
Eventually this will be integrated with the F35[1] reducing risk to human pilots.
There's an inflection point where technology accrues too much power to a ruling class, such that no amount of unrest or revolution is able reset the social order.
I believe China has already passed this point. Their culture and individual behavior is tightly controlled (e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low).
"(e.g., you can't use public bathrooms if your social score is too low)"
do you have a source on this? i have used dozens of public bathrooms in china and i've never seen any of them gated off for specific people for any reason or anyone checking anything before you go inside
And then there's the Uighur minority who can't buy knives that don't have QR codes on them [0], that is if they haven't been imprisoned or forced into factory labour hundreds of miles from home.
> It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated
Is the claim that the frequency of revolutions scales inversely with internet penetration? Because this is trivially testable and obviously false. (Ukraine and Tunisia off the top of my head.)
even here some jobs you can't get if your credit score is too low.. a definite social ramification. it leaks a bit - but it will be a sieve eventually.
If anything I’m surprised to see the ruling class isn’t starting to lose this battle to the masses. Ukraine’s use of disposable drones plainly shows how easy it is to create smart weapons that could be piloted autonomously (or at least in the “terminal” phase).
Does it? Mass surveillance technology clearly only benefits the state who can run it. A random person or activist group doesn't have NSA like powers. Likewise advancements in tanks or nuclear weapons does not empower the individual.
By targeting the logistical chains that are necessary to deliver said JDAM to the point of actual use.
On the other hand, for the state to use JDAM against the individual, they need to know that said individual is there and is worth targeting, for starters.
I don't think it's accurate to say that the balance of power has shifted on the whole, but regular individuals definitely have access to way more destructive power than they ever had in history. At the same time, modern military technology, while very destructive, is also very demanding in terms of logistics. Even a single blown up railroad, fuel depot, large transformer etc can have a profound effect.
The destructiveness isn't always a positive, either. Any modern military can easily reduce even a very large city to rubble, but to what purpose? A city is only valuable in the grand scheme of things because of its infrastructure and its population that can utilize that infrastructure for some useful economic purpose.
Once saw a terrible movie that started with a similar premise. I dislike giving any machine the agency to decide when to choose to kill. I feel like that way lies danger. I feel that laundering the burden of death through a machine distasteful.
While I understand the purpose of HN is to have meaningful and in-depth discussion, and simply stating an opinion doesn't really contribute much, this is something which is so obviously bad and gives such a visceral reaction that the negative opinion outshines anything else I could say about it.
The amount of shooting is influenced by circumstances. That is to say, if one side doesn't have to risk people dying, then they may be more willing to start a war.
For a given amount of shooting, the number of civilian casualties is not necessarily constant. It's possible that AI may be more prone to targeting civilians or makes it easier to get away politically with killing civilians.
Not all shooting is equally effective. It's possible that AI weapons may give some faction the ability to crush anyone who opposes them.
What about AI bombers, which is just a step away from AI fighters (and is probably significantly easier to implement)? Civilians could absolutely be on the receiving end there.
Well, my preference would be world peace and end to this wasting resource. However I suppose that's quite the pipe dream isn's it?
More seriously tho, here is a positive I can come up with: Race to the bottom on bots and AI, lots and lots of bots and AI, lots and lots of upgrades and updates all the time, and then a MAD stalemate situation again because it becomes it's too difficult to assess the capabilities of the other countries AIs. If that bought us years of peace because everyone was to scare to fight, I'm ok-ish with that (although I doubt it's what will happen).
War is cheapened by lack of bloodshed. Part of what keeps a peaceful state of affairs os the pack of a stomach for the consequences of war as projected through your human actors.
Ironically, all this does is guarantee a greater willingness to reach for the violent solution.
Reminds me of an old sci-fi story where the U.S. and U.S.S.R. both create self-replicating autonomous machine armies and flee underground to let the machines duke it out.
The machines eventually realize fighting each other is pointless, and both start just making sure the humans don't surface until they are capable of living without being crazy asshats. Wish I could remember the title.
As with virtually any military development in world with multiple mutually hostile actors, it doesn't really matter how much we dislike it. If it gives actual advantage in combat, it will be deployed by someone. Once it is deployed by anyone, other actors will have to catch up if they want to continue existing.
there is no way of avoiding it man. You invest in tech and you get skynet, you invest in biology, you get biotics... tough call for me. as i like the brutalist design of terminator but being passed around amongst famous historical figures as their f#kboi for eternity has its own appealas long as you never run into Seth Rogen...
Don't forget that you can score points with the basilisk by actively spreading awareness of its existence (and thereby ensnaring more people in its gambit). ~
I'm often reminded of the beginning of Interstellar, where the grandfather talks about when he was a kid and it seemed like some new amazing thing was invented every week.
I don't think anyone who hangs out on Hacker News has any chance of succeeding as a post-apocalyptic warlord. Best case scenario they end up like the guy who tried to take over Pine Bluff Arkansas[0,1].
what I find to be the hardest part of this discussion is that the people who are most righteous and opinionated about technology like this aren’t the same people whose sons and daughters would be in the cockpits or on the battlefields as the alternative.
Please define what you mean by righteous and opiniated. You seem to have a very precise idea of what they would be saying, why not develop that idea here so it can be discussed instead of weirdly veiled ?
Look at every reply here. It jumps to a conclusion that an unmanned vehicle is making decisions about who dies and thus must be bad. It overlooks the fact that most of us enjoy the stability and protection of militaries that are real people we ask to risk their lives to fly these planes.
Those two statements don't strike me as contradictory. It's entirely possible that someone could enjoy the protection of the military and feel that it is too dangerous for combat to be fought by AI.
By way of analogy, most people who enjoy the protection of the military are opposed to the use of chemical or biological weapons. They recognize that how people fight is also important.
I don’t disagree with that statement, but isn’t it dissonant for there to be no discussion of how the audience here seems to ignore the topic of war when it’s fought in our names by real people, but holds ourselves to such high minded ideals when it’s fought by machines?
Do you know if the people you are observing are more right wing or left? I don't mean that to turn this into political tribalism. I ask because the sense that I've gotten of HN is that most posters lean left and tend towards anti-war but there is a significant right leaning population that are probably left anti-war. I'm trying to map what you are seeing to what I've observed so that I can understand what you are seeing better.
The other comments look to me more like visceral reaction that aren't specially related to your point.
I see them more afraid of military power becoming commoditized (raging a war coming down to a straight economic calculus, more so than even it is now) with very little ethical control. Having people in the cockpit pulling the trigger was a line to cross.
You're focusing on the danger of sitting in the cockpit, they're focusing on the danger of having no one left actually thinking about pulling the trigger. I don't see the two as conflicting, you can have a drone with still a human making the decisions and being accountable on each of the strikes.
Not having domestic people die is uncrontroversial, making the military accountable is a way bigger challenge, so I'd see putting a lot more thought on that part to be a healthy stance.
> There's an inflection point where technology accrues too much power to a ruling class, such that no amount of unrest or revolution is able reset the social order.
To be fair, machines deciding who dies is a pretty common movie and sci-fi plot. And (spoiler alert) it never ends well.
But, if I may, I'd like to challenge your premise somewhat as well. Which is that militaries exist fundamentally to provide "stability and protection".
To be clear, yes militaries are a necessary evil, but they are evil, not good. They exist "because the other guy has one", but then because we have one, we need to use it.
With a few exceptions (ww1, ww2, kuwait) US military adventures have been the problem, not the solution.
The last attack on US soil (Pearl Harbour) was close to 100 years ago. Yet the US military budget is 5 times everyone else combined.
So, I'd argue, the US military does not exist to provide "stability and protection (to US citizens)." It exists as a way of projecting US policy, both as a threat, and occasionally in practice.
I excluded 9/11 though because it's not a military action, wasn't rebuked with military action (at the time) and wouldn't have been prevented with military action.
It is best described as a terrorist attack. The prevention of which is a security function, not a military function.
The existence of a military did of course big a military response, one being an unprovoked attack on Iraq, and the other being a 20 year occupation of Afghanistan which achieved nothing.
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. I can assure you that a large chunk of the military (you know, the people in the cockpits and facing the bullets as you mention) have reservations about AI on the battlefield or reject it altogether.
Let me attempt an optimistic vision. Since antiquity war has been not about fearsome fighters but about economic and institutional strength. (In modern times, also logistics.)
The people were fungible. Mercenaries show that. Soldiers were and remain instruments for production to wield its power through.
The World Wars shocked us because they showed what war between technologically-advanced, industrial states looks like. (We didn’t get horrified by the Holocaust until well afterwards.) There are a variety of reasons we haven’t seen WWIII, chief among them nukes, but what it hasn’t been is aversion to loss of soldiers’ lives. (See: Russia.) As a result, conventional war between industrialised states remains a risk. These technologies—which are principally useful against another state actor and not civilians—reduce the frequency at which that warfare destroys lives versus capital.
(One could argue this increases the chances of war by industrial states against static-army enemies or non-states. But an F-16 flying over Afghanistan is already practically invulnerable.)
> We didn’t get horrified by the Holocaust until well afterwards.
Contrary to popular opinion, the atrocities committed by the Nazis was not a secret. The extent of those atrocities, perhaps, but the newspapers of the day contained stories of those terrible deeds.
Now, the treatment of Allied POWs held in Japan, for the most part, was a surprise, at least for civilians, and from what I've read, many in the military as well.
First, the difference between "bad things" and "atrocities" is the extent or severity.
Second, everything I've seen indicates people did not know a lot of what was going on.
The internet was not a thing. News was being gotten via short videos prior to movies at the movie theater. It was significantly delayed compared to news these days.
Soldiers were shocked at what they found when they liberated concentration camps.
A game was created to explain to modern peoples or demonstrate how this could be engineered while keeping most participants in the dark. People delivering train loads of people to concentration camps didn't know the full story.
For example, using long range radar the pilot selects several enemy jets, and directs the drones to engage those jets. Or the pilot can direct a drone to go ahead of his formation to penetrate hostile air space and collect data he can use to decide next steps.
ACE creates a hierarchical framework for autonomy in which higher-level cognitive functions (e.g., developing an overall engagement strategy, selecting and prioritizing targets, determining best weapon or effect, etc.) may be performed by a human, while lower-level functions (i.e., details of aircraft maneuver and engagement tactics) is left to the autonomous system.[0]
Eventually this will be integrated with the F35[1] reducing risk to human pilots.
0. https://www.darpa.mil/program/air-combat-evolution
1. https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-...