AI in Battle.

The current Reith Lectures on BBC Sounds by top AI (English) guy at Berkley focuses on its killing potential. Drones the size of a shoe polish tins, (surely shoe polish went extinct in the sixties with Brill Cream), can search a crowd for a particular faces and shoot them between the eyes like a swarm of killer bees. 4 in a purse, 150 in a suitcase, thousands in a container etc. Plate sized ones can take out a tank. English Berkley man drones on about the ethics of autonomous AI warfare and the difficulty of getting governments to sign up to a banning treaty. Unfortunately countries that already have them are sanguine about the whole thing: Sod the others. He foresees AI running amok at the human race’s expense. But lets just think about this for a moment. Molière ~1650 is famous for a play about a man with a complaint visiting various doctors. Curiously each doctor has the precise expertise to cure him. So maybe Al English isn’t the perfect guy to think about these things. Unless we’ve been getting it wrong for centuries the old adage is ‘first shoot the guy who’s shooting at you’, and I’m sure AI would figure this out in nanoseconds. ‘Screw facial recognition that tin’s trying to kill me!’ Killer bee shoe polish tins will be falling out of the sky like rain and you’ll be quite safe unless the one or two left over has your face in its memory banks. Then there’s ‘close the window’ or put on glasses and false teeth. It all becomes the Vintage Guess Who Board Game 1979 MB Games, ebay, £18.99. Or ‘they’ might decide to wipe out the Pentagon with a dinner plate, which of course would be empty, its previous inhabitants holed up under a disused petrol station in Montana. Basically unless you kill indiscriminately, another old adage of warfare, you’re not going to get anywhere. Humans will be quite safe as our AI fights their AI because we’re too slow, too big, too weak, can’t fly and are comparatively stupid. In Star Wars nobody ever considers the design and engineering effort, the mountain of resources and raw materials used to build the Death Star, just think of the wiring loom! Not to mention the meticulous selfless training of Star Troopers willing to die in their thousands for a cause they never question so long as they get the overtime. Maybe the upshot will be us humans will realise we’re just another animal like all the rest but with a hyper active brain complaint, and that won’t be such a bad thing.