More digressions about AI

Of course, there are other dangers. Whether or not we go all the stops along the way to creating an arbitrarily more capable version of the infamous Daleks from the popular Doctor Who series, invented by writer Terry Nation, the all-too predictable result of such an effort is not an experiment that most humans would prefer to see play out in real time. That isn't to say that benign uses of realistic humanoid robots aren't possible, even if a majority of people, aligned possibly along readily identifiable cultural boundaries, might find the idea of cohabitation with such devices distasteful. (Yes, it is a little weird to be referring to something that one would interact with almost as one would with an actual person as a "device", but these are the waters humanity is now definitively wading into).

I tend to be somewhat skeptical about the widespread adoption of truly autonomous AI robots employed for military purposes for the simple reason that such entities would presumably be just about as useful to the military as the proverbial soldiers given experimental doses of LSD to see what would happen to the chain of command during the 1950s. To put it bluntly, if a machine can't or won't follow orders as given in a more or less brain-dead and totally predictable fashion, why would any military have a reason to invest in the technology? That is, unless the top brass are also getting into reading tea leaves and studying the works of Nostradamus.

Just sayin'.

Which is entirely possible. However, the possibility of semi-autonomous killer robots guided by advanced AI control systems with the potential to cause severe harm and widespread or targeted destruction during armed conflicts IS very real, and authoritarian governments already have a great deal of interest in such systems. So does my government, which isn't at all a coincidence.

WHICH brings us to another less-oft remarked upon issue regarding AI warfare: the question of purpose. If we are at a point where, as a species and as a planet, people no longer see the purpose or utility of sending brave young men and women into lethal contests between nations or causes, and instead send a machine in their place, then at what point do we simply begin to question the fundamental point of the enterprise? Might we at that point simply have rendered warfare, in any conceivably meaningful sense, obsolete?

This brings the issue full circle* back to the question of human intelligence raised in the article by Shannon Vallor. If we devalue the nature of human intelligence by glibly applying AI to dubious, mundane or misguided ends, would we not also be rendering the meaning or nature of warfare void and useless via the same means? It seems evident to me that we would. But is that really the point? Don't most intelligent, thinking people already know that war is futile anyway??

* which is also the title of a totally decent Doctor Who episode from the Peter Davison era, and of course the first to feature the character K9.