← Back to context

Comment by the_real_cher

21 hours ago

This, for that check theyll be building the autonomous robots themselves, saying "theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"

26 comments

the_real_cher

Reply
yaur  14 hours ago

Back in 1960 us early detection systems mistook the moon for a massive nuclear first strike with 99.9% certainty. With a fully autonomous system the world would have burned.

cheonn638  20 hours ago

> theyre food delivery robots, thats not a gun that a drink dispenser!"

You underestimate how many top AI scientists are perfectly okay with building autonomous weapons systems and are not ashamed of it.

Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

Now note that many L7+ at OpenAI are making $10 million+ per year.

  • wackget  11 hours ago

    > Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

    I sincerely doubt that's true. I hope it's not. $1m is a lot of money, but I find it hard to believe most people would be willing to indiscriminately kill a large number of people for it.

  • throwaway2037  9 hours ago 

        > Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

    I will respond with a personal, related story. I was living in Hongkong when "democracy fell" in the late 2010s / early 2020s. It was depressing, and I wanted to leave. (I did later.) I was trying to explain to my parents (and relatives) why most highly skilled foreign workers just didn't care. I said: "Imagine you told a bunch of people in 1984 that they could move to Moscow to open a local office for a wealthy international corporation and get paid big money, like 500K+ in today's dollars. Fat expat package is included. How many people would take it? Most."

    Another point completely unrelated to my previous story: Since the advent of pretty good LLMs starting in 2023, when I watch flims with warfare set in the future, it makes absolutely no sense that soldiers are still manually aiming. I'm not saying it will be like Terminator 2 right away, but surely the 19-22 year old operator will just point the weapon in the general direction of the target, then AI will handle the rest. And yet, we still see people manually aiming and shooting in these scenarios. Am I the only one who cringes when I see this? There is something uncanney valley about it, like seeing a character in a film using a flip phone post-2015! Maybe directors don't want to show us the ugly truth of the future of warfare.

    • DharmaPolice  9 hours ago

      I don't cringe because it's for dramatic/narrative effect. It's the same reason the crew of the Enterprise regularly beam into dangerous locations rather than sending a semi-autonomous drone. Or that despite having intelligent machines their operations are often very manual, as it is on many science fiction shows. The audience (if they think about it) realises this is not realistic and understands that the vast majority of our exploration would be done by unmanned/automated vessels. But that wouldn't be very interesting.

      Other universes take it further - Warhammer 40k often features combatants fighting with melee weapons. Rule of cool and all that.

    • fc417fc802  6 hours ago

      Agreed, but I think it goes far beyond warfare. The biggest "plot hole" in much scifi (IMO) is the lack of explanation for why all the depicted systems aren't autonomous. Most worldbuilding seems rather lazy to me, a haphazard mishmash of things that imply AGI and things that would only ever exist in a pre-ChatGPT world.

      One of the few works that at least attempts to get this right is the Culture series where it's remarked on several different occasions that anything over some threshold of computing power has AGI built into it (but don't worry you're totally free, just ignore the hall monitor in all of your devices).

  • tibbydudeza  19 hours ago

    True that - everybody has a price.

    • xphos  17 hours ago

      I mean this is not actually true and the statement justifies and vindicates those that do sell out by saying of course anyone would. There are countless marytr for religion, politics, and other things.

      A better way is to say you can always find a cheap sellout at least than the morally dammed cannot claim equality of belief

      6 replies →