Yep - "feels humanized". As could be said of a spring-gun (outlawed in England ~2 centuries ago), or a grenade-and-tripwire booby-trap laid along a trail regularly patrolled by enemy soldiers, or a WWII acoustic homing torpedo, or ...
there AI hype and there’s this type virulent rejection that doesn’t let you see that if a land mine is bad, one with wheels or wings actively seeking targets is exponentially worse
Words like "autonomous" and "choice" sound cool and philosophical, and push a lot of people's emotional buttons.
The article's leading "OMG, how horrible!!!" line seems to be:
> While the drones are designed to target vehicles such as tanks, rather than infantry, it is almost certain that the resulting explosions are killing Russian soldiers without a direct command from a human operator...
Back in the war zone, soldiers and innocents have to deal with a huge variety of threats, which can be conceptualized as having various degrees of determinism, human agency, and randomness.
From the PoV of a Russian soldier who wants to live (vs. get an "A+" on his Philosophy 483 term paper) - how is that drone really different from land mines, artillery and mortar fire, suppressive small arms fire, "non-AI" rockets & missiles, booby traps, "oops!" friendly fire, etc.? Zero of those things are carefully checking his dog tags, personal morals, or "legitimate enemy combatant in a war zone" legal status.
It's not a philosophical issue and I'm not a philosopher, and to be blunt, I find this kind of glib dismissal of concerns irritating because it is obviously motivated by ignorance, rather than knowledge, and perhaps a bit of sexism on top. For the record, I am a post-doc researcher in a project whose goal is to develop autonomous capabilities for a search-and-rescue craft, I'm the person who is primarily responsible for the development of the autonomous capabilities, and I can assure you that there is no philosophy involved in the issues I have to deal with in my day-to-day job, whatsoever. I was also unaware that what I do is cool, but thanks for letting me know.
I don't understand what the rest of your comment is saying. We have different kinds of systems that kill indiscriminately- so, what? We should be making more because that's OK then?
