this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
232 points (90.8% liked)
Technology
59288 readers
4606 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Australia already has area-denial sentries that autonomously shoot at any motion (with some parameters regarding size and speed).
These, or a similar techology was used for a while along the Korean DMZ until we started talking about building autonomous drones.
One of the shot-down airliner incidents (Flight 007, maybe?) involved a misdesignation of a sensor contact by a US Aegis missileboat system. The plane was pinging with F4 Phantom Radar (which ruled out an ordinary airliner). The Aegis required a human to authorize an attack, but it reported the contact as a bogey (unknown, peresumed to be hostile)...
— Apparently, I posted this without finishing it. —
So that instance might be considered the first historical case of an autonomous weapon system accidentally killing a civilian (at least partially civilan) target, given the human doing the authorizing had inadequate data to make an informed decision.
(A lot of cruelty of our systems comes from authorizations based on partial data. Law enforcement in the US is renowned for massaging their warrants to make them easy on the signing magistrate, resulting in kids and dogs slain during SWAT raids in poor neighborhoods. I'm ranting.)