← Back to context

Comment by CMay

1 month ago

Cars can be used to escape, or to attack. Guns and knives can be used to defend or to attack.

AI has multiple uses. Military attacks can also save lives. As they say, the best defense is a good offense.

The moral element of it largely falls on the people who made the mistake. That said, it is also widely known that civilian casualties are a part of war. The advent of precision strikes has greatly reduced civilian casualties.

Meanwhile, Iran has intentionally promoted the direct targeting of civilians and killed 10s of thousands of their own, while funding proxies that killed many civilians elsewhere.

So now you are using famous knife argument.

In your argument have you considered: selling a knife knowingly to gang members just before they are going to another area to kill other gang members

Anthropic did same when it agreed to sell it's tool to DoW. There is no mistake, no misunderstanding of intentions.

He was super clear that he doesn't give a dime to any lives outside of USA, inside USA he was concerned about automatic weapon usage and surveillance of US citizens, because he himself could be accidentally killed, he doesn't care about others.

  • That's not accurate. AI can help the military increase precision which can also save civilians lives in other countries where the military is active. AI is not intentionally targeting schools the way Russia is in Ukraine. People are going on about this one single accidental school strike in Iran, meanwhile Russia has hit thousands of schools in Ukraine. Something like 1 out of every 7 schools has been damaged or destroyed and even though the numbers are tracked separately, they have killed something like ~800 children.

    A similar argument was made for why Microsoft shouldn't sell software or services to border patrol or ICE. The counter-argument was that if it helps them be more precise and reduce errors in their managing of all the people then it could actually help not just the organization, but also the people.

    Again, whether it's human or AI, mistakes will be made and civilian casualties will likely remain a part of war. AI can ideally keep civilian casualties low.

    • > AI is not intentionally targeting schools the way Russia is in Ukraine.

      Are you sure?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

      They even have the cool one: "Where's Daddy?" - which tracks the suspect and then notifies the officials when suspect is at home, so IDF can bomb the whole building.

      In this case AI is specifically designed to increase the civilian casualties, why not shoot the suspect independently, why include their neighbours, imagine your neighbour in 10 floor apartment building is a terrorist and your building gets bombed because of single person

      6 replies →

    • It ideally can, yes, but if you choose to partake in the military operations by providing your LLM you at least bear some responsibility. When you don't give the DoW access to your LLM it may still be the case that actions will be taken that inflict some humans suffering. In that case you won't have had a hand in it though.