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US military plans to unleash thousands of autonomous war robots over next two years
(techxplore.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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It's just like the popular Sci-Fi classic, Do Not Under Any Circumstances Build Autonomous War Robots.
The real risk here isn't AI take over but total desensitization and alienation to horrors of war. US is already extremely warlike nation and yet already extremely desensitized. American and wider western sense of war is that it happens to other people in foreign countries and only real touch towards war is when somebody they knew went to do war in one of those places and maybe got injured and died. For the rest of the world and those horrors are very real and with higher automation fo war it become even easier to politicians to do when even less bodies are coming home and act of killing is pressing a button and modern shell shock is kinda feeling bad for those people who you killed on that screen.
Curiously, the high turnover rate of drone operators in the US armed forces is one of those demonstrations of how violent games don't desensitize us to violence, because drone warfare is just as good at giving our soldiers PTSD as front line infantry combat.
So it's going to be interesting when a pilot's loyal wingman starts taking out human targets without any confirmation by him or by a fellow human operator. I'm pretty sure if I were a pilot, and my autonomous drone buddies started firebombing villages on my own, it might fuck my head up a bit.