Autonomous weapons still need human accountability

Transcript

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

1. 47:18

   The reason I ask is I want to talk a little bit about the ethics of technology toward the Anthropic run in with the Department of War recently. And I think you guys have both talked publicly about this. But Anthropic refused to let its clawed model be used in Maven without human oversight constraints. This is what's been reported, what Emile Michael has said. And the Pentagon labeled them a supply chain risk.

2. 47:41

   Both AI and generally autonomous systems beg the question, what role should humans have and who should have the right to play that role of hitting the kill switch? What's your view on the role of the technology vendor to the Department of War and where you guys draw your line on what? your responsibilities are with respect to ethics. Well, my view on my responsibility to ethics is a slightly different question than my belief in democracy, which is a different thing. So maybe starting on the democracy point, I believe that the people of America have elected representatives to make really hard decisions about how we engage in combat. Full stop. Fully autonomous weapons are not new. We've had autonomous systems in operation like SeaWiz, which is deployed on naval vessels that shoots down aerial threats fully autonomously. You don't have time

3. 48:35

   to make decisions about incoming missiles or threats to your ship. You just have to shoot it down. So that's what SeaWiz does. Now, SeaWiz has accountability in the system. There's a person on that boat that is responsible for whatever actions that weapon system takes. And I believe that this is the future of autonomous systems, is that just like any other system, whether it's a soldier carrying a gun, they are accountable for what happens with that gun. Or, you know, the captain of a naval vessel, they are responsible for what happens with that CWIS.

4. 49:05

   All of your autonomous systems are going to have accountability baked in. Now, ethically, how do I think about this? You know, I believe that, you know, what Sean was saying about the first offset, the second offset, and the third offset is, you know, we have, we, as a society, we went from like rocks and sticks to, you know, knives to guns to bombs. And then in, you know, World War II, we kind of plateaued with nuclear weapons. And we all looked around at each other and we said, wow, that's pretty crazy. I don't think we want to make more and more powerful nuclear weapons forever. And so actually our engagement in combat has come back down the chain. We're, you know, precision guided weapons. We're shooting non-explosive missiles into windows of apartment buildings, avoiding casualties, unintended casualties. And I think

5. 49:55

   that's really the goal. And if you look at AI as the command center for making better decisions with better precision, with better discrimination, with less civilian casualties, this is good. It's actually ethically far improved from just dropping dumb bombs on areas of cities to eliminate military facilities. So I don't think abstention from participating in the building of technology for national security is a morally neutral decision. You are making a moral decision when you decide to abstain. And I am making a moral decision as a private citizen building a company in this space that I believe that this is ethically just. And I trust in our democracy to deploy those tools with the interests of the American people at heart.

6. 50:38

   There's a lot that's said about Palantir enabling a surveillance state. We had the