If we were able to give the Ukrainians fully automated kill bots, and those kill bots enabled Ukraine to swiftly expel the Russians from their territories, would that not be a good thing? Or would you rather the meat grinder continue to destroy Ukraine's young men to satisfy some moral purity threshold?
If we could give Taiwan killbots that would ensure China could never invade, or at least could never occupy Taiwan, would that be good or bad? I have a feeling I know what the Taiwanese would say.
While we're at it, should we also strip out all the machine learning/AI driven targeting systems from weapons? We might feel good about it, but I would bet my life savings that our future adversaries will not do the same.
Yes, I think Russia's invasion of Ukraine is quite clearly a binary Russia=bad, Ukraine=good. Same for the impending Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Perhaps you could explain the nuances under which Russia was the good guy? Better yet, maybe you could explain it to the Ukrainians who have been displaced, or the family members of those who have been killed, or the soldiers who have been permanently maimed?
Whether you or I like it or not, automatic kill bots will be a thing. It will only be a question of which countries have them and which do not.
And there is evidence automated killbots were already used in Gaza (not that that's a good thing).
Generally, in war, there are no rules, and someone is going to make automated killbots, and I expect one place to see them quite soon is in the Russia-Ukraine war. And yes, I'm hoping the good guys use them and win over the bad guys. And yes, there are good guys and bad guys in that conflict.
Fully automated kill bots are coming, whether any of us like it or not. The question is, which militaries will have them, and which militaries will be sitting ducks? China is pursuing autonomous weapons at full speed.
Personally, I think it'd be great to have the Anthropic people at the table in the creation of such horrors, if only to help curb the excesses and incompetencies of other potential offerings.
Rephrasing your "inquiry" to highlight how short-sighted this is:
If giving the ukranians nuclear warheads could help them default Russia, then isn't that good? Wouldn't using nuclear warheads to erradicate Russia end the war almost immediately?
Like, why are we even bothering with automated killing robots? That's stupid. We already have nukes, and they're the ultimate weapon, so just do that.
Do you not see how this greedy line of logic could easily lead to the destruction of not just the US, but the entire human race?
This is LITERALLY the plot line of Terminator. Literally. "Hey guys let's build skynet, isn't that a good idea??"
Like... do you not hear yourself? What is not clicking here?
> This is LITERALLY the plot line of Terminator. Literally.
No, it's not. Skynet was a recursively self improving ASI. You are conflating an autokill bot and, apparently, an ASI that can embody and replicate itself.
> If giving the ukranians nuclear warheads could help them default Russia, then isn't that good?
Surely, you can recognize how an autokill bot and a thermonucelar weapon are different, right? These are categorically different concepts. What's more, Russia is a nuclear armed opponent with, reportedly, dead man's hand systems that would launch their entire nuclear arsenal even if their command structure is destroyed in a nuclear first strike.
I'll just repeat the basic point here: autokill bots are coming. Whether any of us like it or not. Just like nuclear weapons. If I could wave a magic wand and eliminate all weapons of mass destruction in the world, I would. But that's not reality. So, walk me through how you think this plays out if we don't develop them, but Russia, China, etc. do?
I can't think of a more clear cut case of moral, justified deployment of autokill bots than to aid Ukraine in expelling the Russian invaders.
> No, it's not. Skynet was a recursively self improving ASI. You are conflating an autokill bot and, apparently, an ASI that can embody and replicate itself.
It never said it was any of that. The point of terminator is that decisioning around war was taken out of the hands of humans, and then nobody could control it.
You people really don't get it do you? Skynet doesn't need to be evil, or conscious, or self improving. It can be good, very good. But when WE don't control it, we don't know the consequences of what we created. Nobody saw AI psychosis coming but we created it, by making the models good. By making the models listen to you and agree with you.
For fucks sake, you could make an automated system that just signs postcards and, if you give it enough access, it could wipe out the human race. Not because it's evil, it might not even have an understanding of evil, but because we don't control it, and it will meet it's own goals without concerns for us because it's not human.
> autokill bots are coming. Whether any of us like it or not.
Inevitability is not an argument, and I won't humor it. It's cognitively lazy and dishonest. With this reasoning you can justify ANYTHING. Rape, murder, nuclear warfare, killing and eating children. This reasoning is bad and stupid and nobody should do it anymore.
> you could make an automated system that just signs postcards and, if you give it enough access, it could wipe out the human race.
I mean this sincerely. You really ought to stop reading Bostrom and Yudkowsky. It is very hard to take this kind of hysteria seriously.
> Inevitability is not an argument, and I won't humor it.
It is and I don't care what you will or won't humor. Just answer me this: how will you convince all the other countries of the world to not build terminators? The leading example of "it is inevitable" is of course China. They are already testing and deploying semi-autonomous robots throughout their national security apparatus. If you're answer is: "Just because they do it doesn't mean anyone else should" then you're not to be taken seriously on this topic.
> killing and eating children
I'd really like to know what convoluted scenario you could conjure in which one would argue that killing and eating children is inevitable.
Saying something is hysteria is also not an argument. Again, it's just intellectually lazy. Just because you refuse to take problems seriously doesn't mean they cease to exist, it just means you lack critical thinking.
And, as for eating and killing children, it's easy: starvation. If you're hungry enough you'll eat children. All it takes is a supply chain disruption, much more likely than nuclear war even.
So why not eat the children now? It's gonna happen anyway.
It's true that I am jumping the gun here. We don't need an apocalypse for AI to suck ass. It sucks ass right now and is causing massive problems. We should probably focus on that.
Saying something is intellectually lazy is not an argument. It's just intellectually lazy. Just because you refuse to take China's unrestrained development of autokill bots seriously doesn't mean they won't do it, it just means you lack critical thinking.
Perhaps you could write Xi a nicely worded letter informing him that he really shouldn't let his military-industrial complex develop autokill bots. When he inevitably realizes the error of his ways (mostly due to you accusing him of intellectual laziness), he'll no doubt shutdown autokill bot development. Taiwan and India will rest easy and praise your hard working intellect. Then we can then shift all societal resources to focus LLMs and why you think they suck.
Ukrainian young (24 y.o.) man here. Living and working in police 30 kilometres away from the actual frontline.
No, thanks, we don't need those "fully automated kill bots". There's absolutely no guarantee that they wouldn't kill the operator (I mean, the one who directs them) or human ally.
We're pretty much fine with drone technology we have.
But for me personally, that's not the most important point. What is more important - and what almost no one in the Western countries seems to realise (no offence, but many of westerners seem to be kind of binary-minded: it's either 0xFFFFFF or 0x000000, no middle ground at all) - is that on the Russian side, soldiers are not "fully automated kill bots" either. Sure, there's a lot of... let's say - war criminals. Yes, for sure. But en masse they are the same young men that you can see on the Ukrainian side. Moreover, many people in Ukraine have relatives in Russia, and there already were the cases where two siblings were in different armies, literally fighting with each other. So in my opinion, "fully automated kill bots" are not an option here. At least unless you deploy them in Moscow and St. Peterburg to neutralize all of the Russian elites, military commandment and other decision-making persons of the current regime.
This amounts to an anecdote and an opinion. What are the actual engagement numbers? I suspect Facebook is doing just fine.
My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken Craigslist for person to person sales.
But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from the late 2000s.
Again, I’d love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some guy’s opinion.
My biggest gripe with the reckless, internet-scale scraping done by the LLM corps is that it’s making scraping harder for the small time dirtbag scrapers like me.
Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.
Well you can scale it, which is why housing affordability is higher in many places where the cities are actually far denser than Australia. There are perverse incentives not to though, property prices don’t rise (which is what investors want) if you actually focus on increasing supply.
It wouldn’t be HN without a commenter shoehorning the topic of a thread into proof of their pet problem. See also any topic even remotely tangential to city planning.
So they don’t effectively block communication to and from the device? Or they don’t block all RF? Because the former seems to qualify as working, while the latter seems irrelevant. Or the only sometimes block communication to/from the device?
It is only irrelevant because devices made in this century put a lot of work into not transmitting outside of the intended frequencies.
My old Nokia would smash the whole range of AM/FM and UHF bands.
I don't know about higher frequencies that could escape one of these cages intended to block WiFi/5G/GPS but it is possible in theory and then it would be likely a backdoor that only becomes active when no signal can be detected.
> So they don’t effectively block communication to and from the device?
That is impossible to know without knowing the characteristics of the signal, noise, attenuation performance, sensitivity of the receiver, and other environmental conditions.
> Or they don’t block all RF?
They definitely don’t.
If you want to attenuate an RF signal, you need to do RF engineering. There are products to help people do this (eg RF test enclosure), but they aren’t marketed as “blocking RF” because that is nonsensical. The products that advertise as “blocking RF” without any real specifications are unsuitable for serious RF engineering, they are primarily sold to conspiracy theorists, hypochondriacs, etc.
Yes I have spent thousands of dollars and months testing them.
You can cut off GPS and high frequency cell spectrum pretty easily. Most cell spectrum is effectively attenuated by good quality professional RF enclosures designed for those frequencies. 2.4 ghz signals like wifi (with good quality radios) are hard to attenuate to the point where they can’t connect to other radios nearby, even with very expensive RF test enclosures.
If you’re trying to block against an unknown threat you are fucked. If someone wanted to back door a baseband they’d probably make it transmit at low speeds and low frequencies to be resistant to attenuation.
I read somewhere that LLM chat apps are optimized to return something useful, not correct or comprehensive (where useful is defined as the user accepts it). I found this explanation to be a useful (ha!) way to explain to friends and family why they need to be skeptical of LLM outputs.
> attempted to compensate using prefabulated amulite in the magneto-reluctance housing, but this only exacerbated the side-fumbling in the hyperboloid waveform generators
Wrote my PhD dissertation on this. It would've been in the literature for Apple's engineers to find, but unfortunately I lost institutional support to get this into a journal after my college (Mailorderdegrees.com, an FTX University^TM) folded mid-process.
This belief is how UC San Diego ends up with 900 freshman below high school math proficiency. And thus college becomes a remedial education institution.
If we could give Taiwan killbots that would ensure China could never invade, or at least could never occupy Taiwan, would that be good or bad? I have a feeling I know what the Taiwanese would say.
While we're at it, should we also strip out all the machine learning/AI driven targeting systems from weapons? We might feel good about it, but I would bet my life savings that our future adversaries will not do the same.
reply