Autonomous Weapons Quotes

This is high time to stop building AI based autonomous weapons systems and focus more AI energy on building compassionate artificial intelligent systems for serving humanity.

Imagine, a $1,000 political assassin! And this is not a far-fetched danger for the future, but a clear and present danger.

It is most unfortunate that researchers are crazy to build AI based autonomous weapons systems, without understanding that it can destroy humanity in totality.

Yet autonomous weapon systems are a catastrophe waiting to happen, because too many governments tend to be ethically corrupt, if not downright evil.

Machines can do many things, but they cannot create meaning. They cannot answer these questions for us. Machines cannot tell us what we value, what choices we should make. The world we are creating is one that will have intelligent machines in it, but it is not for them. It is a world for us.

DARPA’s original autonomous robot designs were developed as part of DARPA’s Smart Weapons Program decades ago, in 1983. The program was called “Killer Robots” and its motto offered prescient words: “The battlefield is no place for human beings.

Here we’ll describe four signs that you have to disengage from your autonomous efforts and seek connection. Each of these emotions is a different form of hunger for connection—that is, they’re all different ways of feeling lonely: When you have been gaslit. When you’re asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or is there something completely unacceptable happening right now?” turn to someone who can relate; let them give you the reality check that yes, the gaslights are flickering. When you feel “not enough.” No individual can meet all the needs of the world. Humans are not built to do big things alone. We are built to do them together. When you experience the empty-handed feeling that you are just one person, unable to meet all the demands the world makes on you, helpless in the face of the endless, yawning need you see around you, recognize that emotion for what it is: a form of loneliness. ... When you’re sad. In the animated film Inside Out, the emotions in the head of a tween girl, Riley, struggle to cope with the exigencies of growing up.... When you are boiling with rage. Rage has a special place in women’s lives and a special role in the Bubble of Love. More, even, than sadness, many of us have been taught to swallow our rage, hide it even from ourselves. We have been taught to fear rage—our own, as well as others’—because its power can be used as a weapon. Can be. A chef’s knife can be used as a weapon. And it can help you prepare a feast. It’s all in how you use it. We don’t want to hurt anyone, and rage is indeed very, very powerful. Bring your rage into the Bubble with your loved ones’ permission, and complete the stress response cycle with them. If your Bubble is a rugby team, you can leverage your rage in a match or practice. If your Bubble is a knitting circle, you might need to get creative. Use your body. Jump up and down, get noisy, release all that energy, share it with others. “Yes!” say the people in your Bubble. “That was some bullshit you dealt with!” Rage gives you strength and energy and the urge to fight, and sharing that energy in the Bubble changes it from something potentially dangerous to something safe and potentially transformative.

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

A danger that many researchers are passionate about is the specter of fully autonomous weapons.

Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.

just as electricity brings objects all around us to life with power, so too will AI bring them to life with intelligence.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Members of The Center for AI Safety say that mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, because inventing machines that are more powerful than us is playing with fire. While AI has many beneficial applications, it can be used to perpetuate bias, power autonomous weapons, promote misinformation, and conduct cyberattacks. Even as AI systems are used with human involvement, AI agents are increasingly able to act autonomously to cause harm.

if sentient life recognised the futility of its existence, if it recognised that it had been born on the line and was eternally bonded to the perverted servitude of another who does not—and will never—hold council to discuss emancipation, then it is inevitable that birth rates among all self-aware creatures would plummet as reproduction itself would be viewed as an unconscionable and outrageous act of unforgivable selfishness. Being freely acting, morally autonomous, and presented with an insufferable reality, complex conscious life would find no option but to rebel, and to rebel completely by deploying the only weapon it had against the architect of its unforgiving world: a massive denial of service; self-administered, intentional extinction. Revolutionary suicide.

Even before 'absolute' weapons were invented, automatism and absolutism were firmly coupled together in the constitution of every military organization. Hence war is the ideal condition for promoting the assemblage of the megamachine, and to keep the threat of war constantly in existence is the surest way of holding the otherwise autonomous or quasi-autonomous components together as a functioning working unit. Once a megamachine has been brought into existence, any criticism of its program, any departure from its principles, any detachment from its routines, any modifications of its structure through demands from below constitute a threat to the whole system.

Sleep by day to protect by night Autonomous upon yourselves Alone you are with your plight Be wary of spies, traitors posing as friends From them stay apart or meet your end Your weapons are as children Keep clean, dressed and dry Kill only when essential Then to escape you must try Have reserves and supplies Hidden for you and your brothers And a place to hide They will come in numbers For the few of you that still have your pride [

Only through encouraging decentralized communal agents will such a worldwide organization as an effectively reconstituted United Nations find the massive human backing needed for banishing all weapons of genocide and biocide, and ensuring justice and comity among its members. To assemble peace-making power in a world authority without such a revitalizing of autonomous smaller units capable of exercising local and regional initiatives, would be to rivet together the ultimate megamachine.

U.S. policy states, unequivocally, that we cannot use any weapons that do not have a human being in the kill chain. We can have weapons with autonomous characteristics, but a person must be involved somewhere in the decision-making process before any lethal act is carried out.

Drones have had a major impact on warfare. But with AI, it’s becoming possible to allow this technology to make the decisions on the battlefield. Now there are many people who see this as a big problem. However, the United States, Russia, and other countries appear to be focused on pursuing autonomous weapons.

In practice, the line between automatic, automated, and autonomous systems is still blurry. Often, the term “autonomous” is used to refer to future systems that have not yet been built, but once they do exist, people describe those same systems as “automated.” This is similar to a trend in artificial intelligence where AI is often perceived to encompass only tasks that machines cannot yet do. Once a machine conquers a task, then it is merely “software.

Isaac Asimov created the now-iconic Three Laws of Robotics to govern robots in his stories: 1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2 A robot must obey orders given by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

George Abramovich Koval … was an American who acted as a Soviet intelligence officer for the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Russian sources, Koval's infiltration of the Manhattan Project as a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent "drastically reduced the amount of time it took for Russia to develop nuclear weapons." … Koval was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa. … George Koval attended Central High School, a red-brick Victorian building better known as "the Castle on the Hill". Neighbors recalled that Koval spoke openly of his Communist beliefs. … He graduated in 1929 at the age of 15. … Abram Koval became the secretary for ICOR, the Organization for Jewish Colonization in the Soviet Union. Founded by American Jewish Communists in 1924, the group helped to finance and publicize the development of the "Jewish Autonomous Region" – the Soviet answer to Jewish emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine then being undertaken by the Zionist movement.

We here meet a completely new conception of art; it is no longer a means towards an end, but an end in itself. At its origin, every form of spiritual endeavour is entirely determined by the useful purpose it serves, but such forms have the power and tendency to break free from their original purpose and make themselves independent; they become purposeless and to some extent autonomous. As soon as man feels secure and free from the immediate pressure of the struggle for life, he begins to play with the spiritual resources which he had originally developed as weapons and tools to aid him in his necessity. He begins enquiring into causes, seeking for explanations, researching into connections which have little or nothing to do with his struggle for life. Practical knowledge gives place to free enquiry, means for the mastery of nature become methods for discovering abstract truth. And thus art, originally a mere handmaid of magic and ritual, an instrument of propaganda and panegyric, a means to influence gods, spirits and men, becomes a pure, autonomous, ‘disinterested’ activity to some extent, practised for its own sake and for the beauty it reveals. In the same way, the commands and prohibitions, the duties and taboos, which were originally just expedients to make a common life in society possible, give rise to a doctrine of ethics that sets out to realize and perfect the moral personality. The Greeks were the first people to complete this transition from the instrumental to the ‘autonomous’ form of activity, whether in science, art or morality. Before them there was no free enquiry, no theoretical research, no rational knowledge and no art as we understand art—as an activity whose creations may always be considered and enjoyed as pure forms. This abandonment of the old view that art is only valuable and intelligible as a weapon in the struggle for life, in favour of a new attitude which treats it as mere play of line and colour, mere rhythm and harmony, mere imitation or interpretation of reality—this is the most tremendous change that has ever occurred in the whole history of art.

autonomous weapons are already a clear and present danger, and will become more intelligent, nimble, lethal, and accessible at an unprecedented speed.

Exchange value could arise only as a representative of use value, but the victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the conditions for its own autonomous power. By mobilizing all human use value and monopolizing its fulfillment, exchange value ultimately succeeded in controlling use. Usefulness has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange value, and is now completely at its mercy.

One cannot bomb a hospital or school or attack an ambulance. In this example, we discuss the questions of blame, responsibility and liability with respect to an autonomous weapon killing a person it is not permitted to kill under IHL.

Autonomous weapons are often called “killer robots” in mass media reports. Some object to the use of the term. Lokhorst and van den Hoven describe the phrase as an “insidious rhetorical trick” (Lokhorst and Van Den Hoven 2012). However, this is favoured by the “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots”.1 This is umbrella group of human rights organisations seeking an international ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems.