Disturbing NYT article on robot soldiers
http://nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16robots.html
The following is a rant.
i was struck by how optimistic the guys leading the research are. 10
years until groups of robots can autonomously travel inside “deep
woods” or “dense cities”? 25 years until we have one that “looks,
thinks, and fights like a soldier”? 1/3 of
deep-strike aircraft robotic in a decade? Yeah, right. I say 10 years
until a single autonomous prototype can quickly and
reliably navigate an empty desert with realistic “obstacles” like
hills and ditches.
Now, drones, i.e. guns and a camera on a remote-controlled truck, that
seems more realistic.
And I can guarantee you that a robot that can reliably distinguish an enemy
from a nearby civilian (the “tank or schoolbus” issue) is a very, very
long way off, especially since, after robots are on the battlefield,
the enemy will be actively changing their behavior and appearance to
try and fool the robots into thinking that they are civilians. I bet
we won’t see more than 95% accuracy in the next 30 years, even without
enemy attempts at confusing the robots (which means,
given an equal number of civilians and enemies nearby,
1 civilian target is killed for every 20 enemy targets; hardly an
acceptable ratio). This problem seems “AI-complete” to me. Hope they don’t unleash these
things near any civilians…
February 17th, 2005 at 12:05 am
‘AI-complete’ needs to be a quotable term if it isn’t already (is it?).
February 21st, 2005 at 2:00 am
Looks like the NYT is really into this automated warfare topic:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/weekinreview/20john.html
Here’s the relevant section:
The Pentagon’s promotional material doesn’t mention whether the
contract for the Future Combat Systems, said to be the biggest in
American military history, includes a line item for philosophers. But
they may be best equipped to judge whether computers, despite their
faster speeds, greater bandwidth and bigger memories, are inherently
different - less trustworthy than the gut feelings and hunches of their
keepers.
John Searle, the philosopher at the University of California at
Berkeley whose most recent book, “Mind: A Brief Introduction,” came out
last year, has argued for decades that the brain is not just a computer
strung together from neurons. Whatever is happening in the head - and
nobody really knows - it is not computation. Confuse reason with
calculation, he argues, and disaster lies ahead.
But that has become the minority view. Attend a conference of the
Society for Neuroscience or the Cognitive Science Society and you would
be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t assume deep down that the
brain is some kind of information processor. For the time-being, people
excel at certain tasks, like recognizing faces and making sense of
ambiguous data, but that may be only because of wiring details and
variations in the algorithms - things that eventually could be
simulated electronically. The result would be machinery that can do
anything a person can, but faster and better.
–
I think it’s an unfortunate situation that the popular media is setting up this artificial incompatibility between the idea of mind as computation and “gut feelings.” Of course, to a neuroscientist, gut feelings are just the result of some very fancy computations…