AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: autonomous weapons enter the battlefield | Artificial intelligence (AI)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/14/ais-oppenheimer-moment-autonomous-weapons-enter-the-battlefield
AI’s ‘Oppenheimer moment’: autonomous weapons enter the battlefield | Artificial intelligence (AI)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/14/ais-oppenheimer-moment-autonomous-weapons-enter-the-battlefield
6 Comments
From the article
>A squad of soldiers is under attack and pinned down by rockets in the close quarters of urban combat. One of them makes a call over his radio, and within moments a fleet of small autonomous drones equipped with explosives fly through the town square, entering buildings and scanning for enemies before detonating on command. One by one the suicide drones seek out and kill their targets. A voiceover on the video, a [fictional ad](https://automatedresearch.org/weapon/elbit-systems-lanius-loitering-munition/) for multibillion-dollar Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems, touts the AI-enabled drones’ ability to “maximize lethality and combat tempo”.
>While defense companies like Elbit promote their new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) with sleek dramatizations, the technology they are developing is increasingly entering the real world.
>The Ukrainian military has used [AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives](https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/01/energy/ukrainian-drones-disrupting-russian-energy-industry-intl-cmd/index.html) to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems [identified targets](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-26/us-says-it-used-ai-to-help-find-targets-it-hit-in-iraq-syria-and-yemen?sref=fqqmZ8gi) in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, [used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system](https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/) to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza.
Haven’t AI been used in weapons for a while already, such as various targeting algorithms, fly by wire systems maybe, etc?
Yup, despite hundreds of year of anthropocentrism, humans are inferior
I feel like we’ve had autonomous weapons for decades because we’ve had radars and we have surface air missiles so even though I’m not like a rocket and radar expert I’m pretty sure you can make a surface to error missile bank automatically fire whatever sees on radar, if you wanted to and I Read, they have automatic, though I have never operated one myself
And then something like a guided missile where you fire it and then it’s autonomously going through the air and changing directions at the target and could accidentally go to the wrong target should still be an example of an autonomous weapon, even though it’s only running an autonomous mode for a few seconds.
GPS Navigation, Target identification, Friend or Foe detection have been part of our arsenal for a long time now.
AI based weapons should be able to do more. An example scenario with drones – enemy combatants have captured a building with hostages. The drones move around and identify the targets and hostages. They understand the environment and find out the entry and exit points. Identify the infrastructure and then create a strategy to engage with minimum or no loss of hostages. Maybe take out the power and create diversions to free the hostages and then take out the terrorists. When we get to this level of autonomous interaction, then perhaps we can call it AI based warfare.
The news above is just old oil in a new bottle.
Like a school of fish the idea of drone swarms would be to overwhelm an enemy with speed and numbers. China has experimented giving drones a force field that is protective as well. We know that killer robots are evolving and artificial intelligence gives them more agency. As drone swarms get smaller and faster and cheaper it does change the Dynamics of warfare, invasions and mass casualty events.
Generative AI is being merged into the military systems of both America and China and being used to innovate new kinds of weapons and warfare and cyber security techniques. The other major innovation in warfare is space technology.
Israeli armed forces used in artificial intelligence to a significant degree in Gaza to terrifying ends that was barely covered by the Western media. A lot of these systems were based on software and AI systems of the United States. Essentially an ethnic cleansing event back by America.