
Kalashnikov’s new autonomous weapons and the “Terminator conundrum” - edward
http://newatlas.com/kalashnikov-ai-weapon-terminator-conundrum/50576/?li_source=LI&li_medium=default-widget
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chroem-
I'm curious if the author would also refer to the M4 carbine as an "infamous
killing machine," given the opportunity.

The fact of the matter is that the US is also developing these systems, albeit
with more focus on autonomous air combat vehicles. To say that this is a
Russia-only problem vastly understates how serious of an issue this is.

~~~
lmm
The M4 isn't infamous though? I don't even know which one that is. The M-16 is
famous but associated more with militaries than with guerillas or terrorists.
I can't really think of a US-made weapon with a reputation for disreputable
uses - maybe the "Tommy Gun" (associated with gangsters, at least in the
popular imagination)?

~~~
throwanem
The M4 and M16 are both versions of Eugene Stoner's AR-15 design. You know
which one that is, even if you don't know you know it. Think about the last
movie you saw that was made since 1980 and included American soldiers. What
rifle were they carrying? There you go.

There also exist many AR-15-pattern rifles in the civilian market - obviously
without the full-auto and burst-fire modes one finds in military models, but
otherwise quite similar. They're generally satisfactory firearms - cheap to
feed, not unpleasant to use or overly difficult to maintain.

They're also a longstanding _bête noire_ of the anti-guns crowd, among whom
the type is infamous because people have used them in a few mass shootings,
and also because if you're afraid of firearms already then this type looks
super extra scary - dressed in full tacticool ribs and Picatinny, it looks
like something a Terminator might carry, and they're usually finished in
black.

~~~
lmm
> You know which one that is, even if you don't know you know it. Think about
> the last movie you saw that was made since 1980 and included American
> soldiers. What rifle were they carrying? There you go.

See I thought that was the M-16; I could even have told you "the civilian
version is the AR-15 and doesn't have full auto" but I'd never heard it called
an M4 before. (Speaking as someone from a non-gun country whose only exposure
to any of this is popular culture).

~~~
throwanem
That's not too far off base - just that the AR-15 came first, followed by the
M16 and later M4 variants on the military side, and any number of
manufacturers' and homebrewers' variants on the civilian side.

------
dalbasal
There are two significant parts (IMO) to the trend towards autonomous weapons.
They're very different.

This article seems mostly concerned with autonomous/AI controlled decision
making: picking targets and firing on them.

The 2nd part taking combatants out of the battlefield. This is more
significant, IMO. This applies equally to autonomous & remote operated
weapons. For thousands of years, fighting wars meant endangering soldiers. As
this changes, all sorts of dynamics change, and conflicts may become more

Think of drones. Whatever the tactical implications, I think the strategic
implications have been more important. The US is willing to deploy remote
operated drones in scenarios where they would not have committed troops, even
airforce only.

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pulse7
Sad truth: it WILL be secretly developed with or without ban... We just
discovered yet another self-destruction method... In Smalltalk you could
destroy everything with: "Smalltalk become: nil"

------
enord
Application of unrefined AI in the context of deadly machinery is a real and
immediate AI-danger. Self-refining, wolrd-dominating AI is at present time
just a distraction from this.

~~~
ClassyJacket
It can be worrying to think that aowrson could right now mount a gun to a
drone and have it point at things it thinks look like people and shoot.

Then I remember that with any amount of technology they could just kill me
themselves. Getting hit by a car is a much bigger risk, and the application of
AI to prevent that is a much larger positive than the negatives AI introduces.

~~~
dahoramanodoceu
That must mean you are not in a middle eastern country. It's self centered to
only have concern for your own well-being and myopic to think that, in a world
full of self-centered people, with this tech being mass produced, that you'll
continue living in a northern-atlantic utopia, where the probable causes of
untimely death remain unchanged.

~~~
aseipp
As an American I'm going to go out on a limb and say a big part of this is:
Americans in particular are absolutely insulated from mass death. Why wouldn't
we be? We've never fought major wars on our own soil in over a century. We
haven't had major disease outbreaks killing mass people in like 100 years. We
cannot comprehend it; the idea that mass amounts of people die (1,000,000
iraqis, 100,000s of people in warzones like Syria) in relatively short time
spans is impossible for us to comprehend.

This is the same reason why after 9/11, where a few thousand people died,
people all over the country were literally having shared hysteria -- to the
point of microwaving mail envelopes (Anthrax attacks!) or buying duct tape and
plastic wrap to seal windows (Gas attacks!) They told _kids in school about
this shit_ and to prepare for it. It was hysteria, it was not isolated.

I think most people willingly choose to believe it doesn't happen at all. A
few bombings here and tactical strikes there, twice (or ten) times a day, in a
war for 15 years. "Not that bad".

Meanwhile we sit around and dream up AI scenarios where they're either A) Sci-
Fi novel hellmachines who are bent on total domination of reality unless we
"Fight the Machines" or B) useful, peaceful Roombas and car services that run
us around and do all our chores and can never do any wrong. Look, my car can
get my groceries for me! How fantastic is that! (provided your grocery store
was not blown up by a Hellfire missile last week, of course)

The third possibility, C, that hostile, unrefined AI will be used to continue
to enforce colonial and imperial desires around the world, killing huge
amounts of people? Not possible. It's not fanciful or fantastic enough to
_want_ to believe, so people don't. It's not a Steven King novel or an Elon
Musk jerk-off fantasy. It's just boring old poor people dying.

You only need to watch any discussion on Hacker News about "The threat of AI"
to see how quickly people start talking about self-imposed God-machines, or
talking about Ultra Roombas that do all your earthly chores -- while ignoring
murder-robots in 3rd world countries, manned by massive armies. One of those
is a fantasy dreamt up by 10 year olds, the other is a reality that already
happens today with drone warfare.

------
jpttsn
Today, an opponent would try to fire back at the killing machine's "pilot," is
that right?

With these weapons, the only defense is shooting at the machine itself,
breaking it.

That reduces your chance of stealing the killing machine after taking out its
pilot.

~~~
throwanem
> Today, an opponent would try to fire back at the killing machine's "pilot,"
> is that right?

If you're dealing with an armored vehicle, you're shooting at the vehicle. You
can't shoot at the people operating it, because the armor is in the way. If
you don't have anything to hand that can deal with the armor, you find
something else to do instead. If you do have something that fits the bill,
it's not going to leave the vehicle in an operable state after you use it.

Killing the crew of an IFV or tank during a combat engagement, and then
stealing the vehicle, is something that happens in movies and video games - in
real life, not so much.

~~~
FRex
I read that there have been cases of poorly briefed Ukrainian tank crews
escaping and leaving behind tanks that had huge holes in armor despite the
armor working as intended and preventing damage to anything important and tank
still being fully operational.

Separatists took these over and patched/replaced the broken armor piece and
used them.

It might all have been bullshit though and I can't find that article from
years ago(and it wasn't in English anyway).

~~~
throwanem
Closest I can find is the claim that an IS-3 from late World War II has been
reactivated from a war memorial and possibly sent into combat - where it would
be unlikely to survive the modern environment for very long, I hasten to note,
despite being apparently pretty good for its day.

It's not implausible that a modern weapon could punch a hole in tank armor and
nonetheless not only fail to achieve even a mission kill, but leave the crew
alive. It is really, _really_ improbable, though. I could buy that it'd
happened once, although I'd like to see some kind of cite for that. I'd have a
hard time believing it had happened twice in the same, as yet rather short,
conflict.

~~~
FRex
I have found the article but it's in Polish. I also have no idea how reputable
source this is, they seem very good on the first glance. There are some
website writing about 'military' that are basically right wing trash or
propaganda or conspiracies (or all of the above).

The hole was apparently _not_ clean through because the original armor and
extra layer and reactive armor installed during 'modernisations' did it job
and protected the tank and the crew, it just now has this horribly looking
hole in it so the Ukrainian crew abandoned it and separatists took it. This is
a tank from the 60s, modernised in the 80s, by the way.

[http://dziennikzbrojny.pl/artykuly/art,3,8,8725,pole-
bitwy,1...](http://dziennikzbrojny.pl/artykuly/art,3,8,8725,pole-
bitwy,1,twardy-pancerz-czyli-czy-czolg-zawsze-wybucha-po-trafieniu-cz-
ii-t-64bw-wolki)

English Wikipedia also mentions 65 T-64s variants have been captured in Donbas
(but the link is to a Russian website and I read Russian way too slowly and
need a dictionary to do it so I can't confirm the citation):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_the_Ukrainian_Gro...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_the_Ukrainian_Ground_Forces#Tanks)

------
konart
>we have NEVER caught the Russians doing ANYTHING beneficial for the Human
Race. EVER.

These comments though.

~~~
FRex
Many Russians did plenty of good but their governments are always so awful.

~~~
konart
Not always. See Peter I or Alexander II. Anyways - bad governments have
nothing to do with the contribution of the nation.

------
eb0la
I guess there will be a market soon for adversarial camouflage clothing in
order to hide from roboweapons.

In fact I should be writing a business plan for that business now.

~~~
kbart
It's hard to hide from IR using insulating clothes, because of the heat
building up inside. But an insulating suit with active cooling might be an
interesting idea to explore.

~~~
tormeh
You don't need to hide, you just need to look like something other than a
human.

~~~
dsr_
If you know where the sensors are, you only need to disguise on that side.

~~~
eb0la
In fact you need no disguise: Just the precise amount of interference for the
neural network to see something different.

[https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-
research/](https://blog.openai.com/adversarial-example-research/)

------
baybal2
Fully automatic shoot-to-kill sentry guns are nothing new, and were used at
least since eighties. Patent in Russian
[http://www.findpatent.ru/patent/237/2373483.html](http://www.findpatent.ru/patent/237/2373483.html)

------
throw2016
There is a certain inevitability about this. It will and should make many
uneasy but like everything else autonomous weapons will advance.

Constraints have only worked so far for bio-chemical weapons and even there we
don't know who is doing what. Nuclear weapons are easier to restrict because
some sort of control can be effected on the underlying technology.

The only thing with both the above is the cost of using them is too high, only
one country has used nuclear weapons against a population and it remains an
unconscionable blot for many of us.

Autonomous weapons are much more accessible and will be integrated into modern
conflict and law enforcement, shifting the balance in many scenarios.

------
smsm42
Reading the article:

> In the imminent future, the Group will unveil a range of products based on
> neural networks," said Sofiya Ivanova, the Group's Director for
> Communications. "A fully automated combat module featuring this technology
> is planned to be demonstrated at the Army-2017 forum,

So there's no actual product yet, and there's nothing known about the future
one except that there are "neural networks" involved, whatever it means.
Clearly, there's enough information to make wide-ranging speculations!

------
vanderZwan
I'm not sure what I find more worrying, this, or the other end of the scale:
the inevitability that it becomes technically easier and easier to turn cheap
small autonomous drones into killing machines.

~~~
agumonkey
Maybe man will inadvertently create its own predators ..

------
adzicg
instead of WWII films with people hiding in mud for a tank to pass by so they
could stick a bomb on it, we'll get WWIII films with people hiding in mud with
an ethernet cable

~~~
rimliu
Oh, you reminded me of that horrible horrible TV Series "Scorpion". Could not
get past the second episode and watched the second only too see how much more
stupid can it get.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I haven't seen it.

But it couldn't be worse than the Independence Day movie from 1996. In that
one, the aliens have huge ships; the mothership has one fourth the mass of the
moon. Fortunately, Jeff Goldblum figures out how to upload a computer virus
into the mothership. My memory of the plot is kind of sketchy, since I
certainly wasn't tempted to see it again.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_(1996_film)#P...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independence_Day_\(1996_film\)#Plot)

------
arethuza
In what tactical scenarios would an autonomous mobile heavy machine gun make
sense? Urban warfare against lightly armed opponents?

~~~
walshemj
From the pics it looks like some of these are HMG mounts I could see Tanks and
EVFs having an Ai controlled secondary turrets to reduce crew size. The
Soviets did like multi turreted tanks see the T35

~~~
arethuza
So like a progression of the protection systems that some MBTs already have?

That doesn't sound _quite_ as bad or threatening - although probably very bad
news for anyone trying to take on such a vehicle at close range!

~~~
walshemj
Which would have to face the accompanying infantry as well Tanks don't do very
well in FIBA or Fish And Chips (Fighting In Someone's House, and Causing Havoc
In Public Spaces)

------
trevyn
Why would Kalashnikov choose to do a dog and pony show? Is it like the North
Korean missle parades and a show of power for Russia? Do they just plain up
sell these to certain countries and it's just like any other product launch?
Does Kalashnikov have competitors that they are trying to look better than?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Because they're a business and appearing on a trade show is one of the ways
they do marketing?

------
ricardobeat
We're moving a bit too fast... three years ago this was still science fiction:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9xqdoDc3oI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=e9xqdoDc3oI)

~~~
vanderZwan
I was expecting this classic scene from Robocop:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I'm sure it's only a glitch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM)

------
atemerev
To put some context: we Russians always preferred automated systems to having
humans in the loop — we have a lot of history with particularly prominent
examples of less than fully sane humans in the loop, without proper checks and
balances to restrain them.

So I am absolutely not surprised of the development, and we'll see much more
instances of these systems soon. The only good part is that Russians strongly
dislike complicated control systems, so the "AI" in question will be much
simpler than what would Americans do.

~~~
sharemywin
Can't wait for the new "hot updates from the cloud feature"

~~~
atemerev
No need. We have first-year privates with USB sticks instead. (And our USB
sticks are, of course, plug-in incompatible with Western USB sticks, and weigh
at least 15 kilograms, which greatly aids security).

------
jlebrech
building something like that with rubber bullets would be cheaper than THE
wall

------
mathieubordere
This cannot end well.

------
throwawaymanbot
I cant help but feel that the military and its money sucking contractors are
in for HUGE disruption.

Why even have a military. Just keep a few special forces and augment the rest
with Autonomous/AI gadgets such as these.

Sell your defense shares.

------
kofejnik
Look, you have to understand something: in Russia, human life has no intrinsic
value at all, so it's not a conundrum in any way. New weapon can kill more
people, all by itself? Great, bring more of those!

If you don't believe me, just read up on Russian history. Maybe start with
Ukrainian genocide in 1932-33.

~~~
Grangar
And other arms manufacturing countries are different from this how..?

~~~
Sommersonn
For starters, they're not trying to kill their own citizens by millions.
Except North Korea maybe.

