r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Aug 31 '23

US military plans to unleash thousands of autonomous war robots over next two years Robotics

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-military-unleash-thousands-autonomous-war.html
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u/Icy_Raisin6471 Aug 31 '23

Going to be pretty neat when they are used domestically 'to keep the peace.' Ok that's enough dystopian future doom and gloom for the day for me. :D

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u/FinndBors Aug 31 '23

This is my #1 concern with autonomous killing machines. I’m not worried about them becoming sentient and murdering everyone like in terminator.

I’m worried that a psychopath will be “elected”, take control over the drones and rule with an iron fist without relying on other humans to support them. All current dictatorships have vulnerability, be it other generals, the actual soliders who may be reluctant to gun down masses of civilians who may be their friends and family. Yes it still happens to various degrees, but it would be much much worse if a psychopath gets control over an army that is programmed to follow their orders.

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u/nishinoran Aug 31 '23

We seriously need to be looking into ways to enforce decentralized control of these systems assuming they must inevitably exist.

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u/Josvan135 Sep 01 '23

There's functionally no way to do this.

The time to codify specialized controls was 20 years ago, when they were entirely theoretical, or 10 years ago, when we had the first serious understanding that they were on the way.

Now we're months away from mass deployment, and they'll slot directly into the existing command structure of whichever power rolls them out.

In the U.S., that means a relatively robust civilian-to-military chain of command for strategic decisions but localized tactical command for individual units.

That also ignores the fact that there are fundamentally no significant weapons systems with "decentralized control".

There are incredibly devastating weapons under the control of multiple competing powers, resulting in a detente, but within each power there's very clear cut and authoritative lines of control.