Verbatim Mac
Dual use tech results in militarized AI
Download 357.18 Kb.
|
High Speed Rail Affirmative Politics Elections Link Turns UTNIF 2012
Dual use tech results in militarized AIKaspersen 16 [Anja, Head of International Security @ World Economic Form, “We're on the brink of an artificial intelligence arms race. But we can curb it”, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/should-we-embrace-the-rise-of-killer-robots/, June 2016]-DD For obvious reasons, militaries do not reveal all their work on weaponizing artificial intelligence. However, Russia recently unveiled their “Iron Man” humanoid military robot, aiming to minimize the risk to soldiers in dangerous situations. The US and Chinese militaries, among others, are also investing heavily in AI and robotics. The US “third offset” strategy explicitly aims to keep it ahead in the technology game. The geopolitical dimension to the third offset strategy indicates an incipient AI arms race. As US Deputy Defence Secretary Work put it: “our adversaries are pursuing enhanced human operation and it scares the crap out of us, frankly”. An AI arms race would be unlikely to be as stable as the Cold War stand-off involving mutually-assured destruction. A common concern among AI researchers in the recent TechEmergence survey was the difficulty of predicting what happens when artificial intelligences engage with each other. In contrast to the Cold War paradigm of military-sponsored cutting-edge research eventually spawning private sector applications, militaries are not necessarily at the cutting edge. Potentially weaponizable, “dual use” AI is increasingly being developed first in the private sector. For example, quadrocopter development is driven by commercial aims such as package deliveries. Facial recognition algorithms have a broad array of private sector as well as public security applications, such as recognizing when valued customers enter a store. According to Mary Cummings, the prominent robotics professor and former fighter pilot, “I guarantee you, Google and Amazon will soon have much more surveillance capability with drones than the military”. She asks, “What happens when our governments are looking to corporations to provide them with the latest defence technology?” The robotics race right now is causing a massive brain drain from militaries into the commercial world. The most talented minds are now being drawn towards the rewards offered in the private sector. Google’s AI budget would be the envy of any military, and it can leverage its commercial activities to further research – for example, launching a photo storage service which will help refine its facial recognition software. The significance of the private sector taking the lead is enormous: when technologies can be bought off-the-shelf, AI is potentially weaponizable by any non-state actor. Sooner or later, it will become trivially easy for organized criminal gangs or terrorist groups to construct devices such as assassination drones. Indeed, it is likely that given time, any AI capability that can be weaponized will be weaponized. As AI develops, early attempts to weaponize it are likely to be buggy and prone to misfiring. But another implication of the brain drain from the military to private sector is a reduction in capacity to test and verify the effectiveness of technology, to a degree that would instil confidence in battle situations. Legitimate actors may not want to send a technology that is considered only 80 percent ready into the battlefield. Rogue actors, though, are unlikely to care about compliance or a bit of collateral damage. A terrorist organisation such as ISIS might be only too willing to use an 80 percent-ready AI weapon, with devastating results. AI causes extinction - especially true in a militarized context where they don’t have extensive knowledge of the value of humanityDownload 357.18 Kb. Share with your friends:
|