Autonomous weapons could lower the cost of invasion

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:01

   Lethal autonomous weapons. That means things that can kill you and make their own decision about whether to kill you. Which is the great dream, I guess, of the military-industrial complex, being able to create such weapons. So the worst thing about them is big, powerful countries always have the ability to invade smaller, poorer countries. They're just more powerful. But if you do that using actual soldiers, you get bodies coming back in bags, and the relatives of the soldiers who were killed don't like it, so you get something out of Vietnam.

2. 26:40

   In the end, there's a lot of protest at home. If instead of bodies coming back in bags, it was dead robots, there'd be much less protest, and the military-industrial complex would like it much more because robots are expensive. And suppose you had something that could get killed and was expensive to replace. That would be just great. Big countries can invade small countries much more easily because they don't have their soldiers being killed.

3. 27:08

   And the risk here is that these robots will malfunction or they'll just be more? No, no. Even if the robots do exactly what the people who built the robots want them to do, the risk is that it's going to make big countries invade small countries more often. More often because they can. Yeah, and it's not a nice thing to do. So it brings down the friction of war. It brings down the cost of doing an invasion.

4. 27:31

   And these machines will be smarter at warfare as well. Well, even when the machines aren't smarter. So the lethal autonomous weapons, they can make them now. And I think all the big defence smarts are busy making them. Even if they're not smarter than people, they're still very nasty, scary things. Because I'm thinking that, you know, they could show just a picture, go get this guy. Yeah. And go take out anyone he's been texting and this little wasp.

5. 27:59

   So two days ago, I was visiting a friend of mine in Sussex who had a drone that cost less than £200. pounds and the drone went up it took a good look at me and then it could follow me through the woods and it followed it was very spooky having this drone it was about two meters behind me it was looking at me and if i moved over there moved over there it could just track me for 200 pounds but it was already quite spooky yeah i imagine there's as you say a race going on as we speak to who can build the most complex autonomous weapons.

6. 28:34

   There is a risk, I often hear, that some of these things will combine and the cyber attack will release weapons. Sure. You can get combinatorially many risks by combining these other risks. So, I mean, for example, you could get a super intelligent AI that decides to get rid of people. And the obvious way to do that is just to make one of these nasty viruses. if you made a virus that was very contagious, very lethal, and very slow, everybody would have it before they realized what was happening.

7. 29:10

   I mean, I think if a superintelligence wanted to get rid of us, it would probably go for something biological like that that wouldn't affect it. Do you not think it could just very quickly turn us against each other? For example, it could send a warning on the nuclear systems in America that there's a nuclear bomb coming from Russia, or vice versa, and one retaliates. Yeah, I mean, my basic view is there's so many ways in which your superintelligence could get rid of us.

8. 29:33

   It's not worth speculating about. What is... What you have to do is prevent it ever wanting to.