Slaughter Bots

Anybody see the slaughterbots video on youtube? If not, here's a link:

It's starts out with something that looks like a TED Talk. The presenter introduces a little flying drone to the audience. He states that the drone, which is used for assassinations capable of recognizing faces, and flying erratically to dodge bullets. It's also equipped with a few grams of high explosive, capable of penetrating a human skull and scrambling the contents.

He vaunts these robots as a way to launch a risk-free war - just program the demographic information regarding the targets (e.g. age, sex, ethnicity, etc.) and the bots will swoop in and go to work. According to the speaker, the bots render nuclear weapons obsolete.

By the end of the video, we find out that slaughterbots are not real (not quite yet at least). The clip was created by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. It ends with a short speech by Stuart Russel, a Political Scientist with UC Berkley. The essence of his message is contained in his line: "allowing machines to choose to kill humans would be devastating to our security and freedom."

https://www.stopkillerrobots.org

I tend to agree with this sentiment. I don't see much net benefit in making killing easier. If I had it my way, wars would still be fought with swords. That would certainly reduce casualties (and probably also enlistment). However, the technology a difficult thing to rein in - even when its effects are, in the net, negative for humanity. The reason for this is that we may lose the comparative advantage if we choose not to adopt something like slaughterbots.

Consider a tamer example: cell phones. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they reduced the overall quality of our lives. Nevertheless, we're helpless to resist - doing so would put a damper on one's career and social life, etc. So, we're forced to adopt. This is nothing new technology has been revising the human experience since we started using tools in the jungle. My point is just that we have less control over where it takes us than we might believe, since the consequences of resisting it would put us (individually and as groups) at a comparative disadvantage. And although I think tech has generally improved the quality of our lives, I do not believe that this is an inherent quality of new, and widely adopted tech.

I guess I'm a bit of a luddite.

Just my two cents. Thanks for reading and have a great weekend.