The gap may be huge morally but it’s very narrow in practice. The problem is that general purpose includes any purpose, including murder. It’s rather different from airborne drones because it can be much stealthier and can simply move into position in advance, wait in silence and strike without warning and like drones it is effectively disposable so there would be very little form of effective defense against such tactics deployed at scale, but qualitative differences like that aren’t really the main point we should be concerned about. The point is, we cannot ignore the extreme, profound danger these technologies pose to the protection and continued functioning of human civilization simply because it is not designed for it. It may be too late to stop it completely, but that’s absolutely no excuse for leaving it unchecked and allowing it to run rampant.
Nuclear weapons technology never stopped developing, but as humans, we all agreed it was too dangerous to let proliferate freely, and we have kept it in check and so far managed to avoid annihilating ourselves with it. It may not be the greatest success story, but it is the best we’ve been able to do, and there’s no reason not to keep trying, if the alternative is annihilation, and I believe in both cases it is.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Yeah I’ve seen the Ghost Robotics prototype and I’m not a fan.
I agree with you about keeping a watchful eye on the potential dangers of developing technologies. My original point was simply to add nuance to the “robot = weapon” reaction. These things are tools. A knife can prepare food or inflict harm.
I think these days all of the new tech seems shitty or scary because of societal issues. Like how the absolute worst people in the world are in charge of these companies.
Yeah I agree with you here. A general use diaster response robot is just naturally going to have a lot of overlap with a general use war support robot. It becomes a complicated issue and what we would hope would be the stop gap of intelligent and responsible goverment oversight and regulation is of course malevolent and entirely captured by greed and nefarious interests.
Ideally all the robotics and AI people would rebel and we would install some utopic democracy built on human prosperity and freedom, but it’s a hard coordination problem to solve and the deck is stacked against us.
The gap may be huge morally but it’s very narrow in practice. The problem is that general purpose includes any purpose, including murder. It’s rather different from airborne drones because it can be much stealthier and can simply move into position in advance, wait in silence and strike without warning and like drones it is effectively disposable so there would be very little form of effective defense against such tactics deployed at scale, but qualitative differences like that aren’t really the main point we should be concerned about. The point is, we cannot ignore the extreme, profound danger these technologies pose to the protection and continued functioning of human civilization simply because it is not designed for it. It may be too late to stop it completely, but that’s absolutely no excuse for leaving it unchecked and allowing it to run rampant.
Nuclear weapons technology never stopped developing, but as humans, we all agreed it was too dangerous to let proliferate freely, and we have kept it in check and so far managed to avoid annihilating ourselves with it. It may not be the greatest success story, but it is the best we’ve been able to do, and there’s no reason not to keep trying, if the alternative is annihilation, and I believe in both cases it is.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Yeah I’ve seen the Ghost Robotics prototype and I’m not a fan.
I agree with you about keeping a watchful eye on the potential dangers of developing technologies. My original point was simply to add nuance to the “robot = weapon” reaction. These things are tools. A knife can prepare food or inflict harm.
I think these days all of the new tech seems shitty or scary because of societal issues. Like how the absolute worst people in the world are in charge of these companies.
Yeah I agree with you here. A general use diaster response robot is just naturally going to have a lot of overlap with a general use war support robot. It becomes a complicated issue and what we would hope would be the stop gap of intelligent and responsible goverment oversight and regulation is of course malevolent and entirely captured by greed and nefarious interests.
Ideally all the robotics and AI people would rebel and we would install some utopic democracy built on human prosperity and freedom, but it’s a hard coordination problem to solve and the deck is stacked against us.