

AI may be better than natural intelligence at coping with battlefield chaos - ascuttlefish
http://www.economist.com/node/17572232?story_id=17572232?fsrc=spblg/251110

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arethuza
In an interview with Andy McNab (former member of the SAS and now a fairly
successful author) in the Scotsman at the weekend I was rather surprised that
he has been taking part in a UK research program to develop technology to
suppress the parts of the brain that "implement" fear and empathy - arguably
making a person more machine like. He was being studied as he clearly doesn't
do much in the line of fear or empathy!

The interview is here:

[http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-
soldie...](http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-soldier-
and.6642566.jp)

The bit about the brain scans is on page 5:

[http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-
soldie...](http://www.scotsman.com/spectrum/Interview-Andy-McNab-soldier-
and.6642566.jp?articlepage=5)

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jimbokun
Sounds like the first step towards the Cybermen.

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arethuza
Or the neural "priming" mods from Greg Egan's _Quarantine_ \- or even, perhaps
more alarmingly if the changes can be made semi-permanent, _focus_ from
Vinge's _A Deepness in the Sky_.

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khafra
Autonomous battle robots making their own tactical and possibly strategic
decisions? I see no way this could go wrong.

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jamii
As opposed to tired, stressed and easily overwhelmed humans making tactical
and strategic decisions? I share your concern but I don't think its impossible
for an AI to get to the point where it makes less mistakes than a human.

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khafra
The stereotypical danger isn't that they'll make fewer mistakes than a human,
it's that the mistakes they do make will be much bigger--continually
offloading decisionmaking and decision enforcement to AI without a coherent
theory of friendliness is like using Martingale betting: You don't lose often,
but it only takes one to wipe you out.

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jamii
True. I would imagine that the way to use AI in the context of managing
information overload on the battlefield is to have AIs prioritise information
and propose options and have humans review the options and take decisions. By
having the AI deal with incoming information and humans making the decisions
you get the best of both worlds, at least with current technolody. Taking
humans out of the loop entirely won't be a good idea for a long time yet.

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anthuswilliams
Keeping humans in the loop doesn't do as much as we think, because humans have
a natural inclination to trust computers. In a high-stress situation, such as
a battlefield, a human will defer to a computer even if the computer reports
information that, under normal circumstances, would be obviously false. In
1988, for example, the USS Vincennes shot down a civilian airliner because its
AI targeting system had misidentified it as an enemy aircraft. Giving
individual humans access to an off-switch is a pretty suboptimal way to
prevent AIpocalypse.

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btilly
There is a point to warfare. It is to make things so unpleasant for the other
side that they have no choice but to submit.

The more we try to computerize warfare and make it antiseptic, the easier it
becomes for us to ignore that fact. Admittedly this is effective - when we
don't feel the pain of war we are able to inflict more of it - but
fundamentally I think it is wrong.

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lwhi
Maybe war will evolve into an expensive, highly roboticised, chess game?

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sudont
Maybe all war will condense to genocide.

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lwhi
I prefer my version, but I think you might have the edge.

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ascuttlefish
For more information, here is the project webpage:
<http://www.aladdinproject.org/>

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maeon3
The future of warfare is in robots making war time strategic decisions, guys,
can't we just take this to its logical conclusion and settle matters over a
nice game of chess.... Best 2 out of 3?

Ultimately war will exist entirely online, because all of the most important
things will be in cyberspace. Once reality as we know it has been reduced to
simply hosting the processors that host our made up worlds, then maybe we can
permanently keep war where it should be, inside video games.

~~~
jimbokun
"The future of warfare is in robots making war time strategic decisions, guys,
can't we just take this to its logical conclusion and settle matters over a
nice game of chess.... Best 2 out of 3?"

This was the plot of a Star Trek episode, where the losers had to docilely
line up to be incinerated when the computer determined that they had been
"killed" in the simulated battles. It was all much less messy that way.

Of course, when Kirk destroyed the incinerators (or was it the master
computer?) they had to decide whether to fight the messy way, or maybe just
not fight at all.

