Tag: ai

Social Animal

Adam Brokken’s also working to make Social a fully-realized artificial intelligence, a creature that can better pass the Turing test. “I am also working on a method to have the bot remember conversations, adding more animations based on responses, etc. Whether he will ever live up to his last name, time will tell.” (That is to say, this.)

Adam recognizes the controversies that have swirled around reverse engineered avatars. “I know there has been much drama concerning ‘bots’ in Second Life, and they still do give some ill effects such as texture spamming. I myself have been hit a few times.

NPC are coming to SL. luis called my attention to this: basically eliza in a new package. based on AIML, pretty much the standard these days for AI chatterbots

Consciousness

A self-published tome on whether humans are robots.

The idea that we are robots – nothing more than machines automatically carrying out pre-programmed instructions – has to be one of the most difficult concepts for the human mind to accept.

After all, if there’s one thing that appears to be perfectly obvious about being human it’s that we’re free to make our own choices, free to do what we like with our lives.

The purpose of Conscious Robots is to encourage us to face up to the reality of being human

to help us accept that we’re robots
to understand how ‘being a robot’ affects our lives
most importantly, to understand how it affects our chances of getting what we want out of life.

2007-03-12: Rat Metacognition

Jonathon Crystal figured out a clever experiment to test rats’ awareness of their thinking. They presented the rats with a “sound classification” test: They trained the rats to associate a long, 8-second burst of static with pushing 1 particular lever, and then trained them to associate a short, 2-second burst of static with a different lever. They’d play 1 of the 2 sounds, and if the rats pushed the correct lever, they’d get 6 food pellets; pushing the wrong lever got them nothing. The rats quickly learned to distinguish the 2 sounds by duration, and ate tons of pellets. Then things got interesting. The scientists made the test harder. They started playing bursts of static that were of intermediate length — 4 seconds, 5 seconds, 6 seconds — and thus harder to classify as “long” or “short”. Suddenly, the rats decided to forgo the test and simply stick their noses in the food trough to get the smaller reward. Apparently, the rats realized that they were now unlikely to pass this much-harder test, so they skipped it

2007-04-04: Animal metacognition. It would be helpful to have a chart with the various components of sentience / intelligence, and give examples for which species have which.

The demonstration of metacognition in nonhuman primates has important implications regarding the emergence of self-reflective mind during humans’ cognitive evolution

2007-08-22: Lack of metacognition in children and rats might be due to experimental deficiencies.

most tests of metacognition asked the participants to use words to describe their internal states — which is why little kids couldn’t do it very well. The barrier was linguistic, not cognitive. So she devised a metacognition test that asked preschoolers instead to point to pictures to illustrate their internal state. Ghetti would pose the kids a question, and ask them to point to a picture of a confident-looking child if they were sure of the answer, or a doubtful-looking child if they weren’t sure.

2007-12-29: Role of the thalamus

Some seemingly unconscious patients have startlingly complex brain activity. What can it tell us about the nature of consciousness? Early evidence indicates a link between consciousness and the ability to integrate information. In a study of 60 patients in the vegetative state, the 7 patients who later awakened recovered brain metabolism in regions that connect the cortex with the thalamus, a relay center in the brain.

2009-06-27: Whale Cognition

They might even deserve to be considered people.

Not human people, but as occupying a similar range on the spectrum as the great apes, for whom the idea of personhood has moved from preposterous to possible. Chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos possess self-awareness, feelings and high-level cognitive powers. So do whales and dolphins. Their capacities could be even more ancient than our own, dating to an evolutionary explosion in brain size that took place millions of years before the last common ancestor of the great apes existed.

2013-12-12: the network is the computer

What happens to the brain under anesthesia suggests that the synthesis and integration of information among many different parts of the brain is the best measure of consciousness. This communication among regions is consciousness itself.

2015-12-01: Fish consciousness?

Researchers have made the first observations in fish of an increase in body temperature of 2–4 ºC when zebrafish were subjected to a stressful situation. This phenomenon is called “emotional fever” because it’s related to the emotions that animals feel in the face of an external stimulus, which been linked, controversially, with their consciousness. Until now, emotional fever had been observed in mammals, birds and certain reptiles, but never in fish, which is why fish have been regarded as animals without emotions or consciousness. Despite the small size of the fish brain, detailed morphological and behavioral analyses have highlighted similarities between some fish brain structures and those seen in other vertebrates, such as the hippocampus (linked to learning and spatial memory) and the amygdala (linked to emotions) of mammals.

2015-12-14: Bicameralism

Although Julian Jaynes, who died in 1997, never completed another book, The Origins of Consciousness in Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will carry his name into eternity. John Updike wrote in The New Yorker that when Jaynes “speculates that until 3 ka BP men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of gods … we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis through all the corroborative evidence he finds in ancient literature, modern behaviorism, and aberrant psychological phenomenon such as hypnotism, possession, glossolalia, prophecy, poetry, and schizophrenia

2016-04-27: Insects are conscious

“Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentrico, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience.” Consciousness appeared to be associated with the “midbrain”. That part of the brain is the ancient core of the brain, which supports awareness for us and apparently for insects, too.

2016-06-19: Split brain

So, if your brain is split, who is the ‘you’ in this situation? From the outside, it’s tempting to think of the part of the brain that’s speaking as the person, but something is hearing and answering questions. And, though right brain can’t speak, it does understand faces, which left brain can’t. If this is you, you don’t know who your friends and family are in a crowd. This act of cutting exposes two minds in one head, and the talking mind doesn’t know there’s someone else in the house. The left brain can describe the situation it’s in, but nonetheless will constantly be surprised by right brain’s actions and explain them away. There’s a question to be asked here: Why, after separation, does right brain not totally freak out, but instead plays along helpfully, answering questions, and listening to left-brain’s dumb stories about what’s happening.

2016-11-11: Seats of consciousness?

Neurologists haves identified 3 specific regions of the brain that appear to be critical components of consciousness: 1 in the brainstem, involved in arousal; and 2 cortical regions involved in awareness. “This is most relevant if we can use these networks as a target for brain stimulation for people with disorders of consciousness. If we zero in on the regions and network involved, can we someday wake someone up who is in a persistent vegetative state? That’s the ultimate question.”


2018-01-05: Awake Under Anesthesia

There are no perfect studies of awareness under anesthesia. Studies like Russell’s, which use real patients, tend be poorly designed; those that use volunteers don’t involve real surgery. Investigating anesthetized awareness without surgery “is a bit like testing your windshield wipers without rain.” “A surgical incision has a galvanizing effect even on an anesthetized patient,. As the scalpel enters, her heart beats faster, her blood pressure rises, sometimes she jerks. She might edge closer to consciousness.” Another approach, of course, is simply to ask large numbers of people what they remember after they emerge from surgery. A study published in The Lancet in 2000 surveyed 12K patients who had undergone surgery. The researchers found 18 people whom they could be confident had been awake. The patients were surveyed at different times—just after the operation and at various intervals thereafter. Some remembered their experiences right away; others had no recollections at first but recalled the surgery after 1 week or 2. 1 remembered the surgery in detail only 24 days afterward.

2019-03-18: Consciousness Origin

Kurzgesagt explores how scientists believe consciousness first evolved, from organisms moving more quickly when consuming food to animals who can remember where they hid food to reading the minds of competitors and allies

2019-07-07: Animal consciousness

Despite groans of anthropomorphism, it’s not your imagination. Animals have a far deeper internal life than we’ve known.

and

For many scientists, the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.

2019-09-26: Consciousness without Language

There is ample evidence from split-brain patients that consciousness can be preserved in the nonspeaking cortical hemisphere, usually the right one. These are patients whose corpus callosum has been surgically cut to prevent aberrant electrical activity from spreading from one to the other hemisphere. Almost half a century of research demonstrates that these patients have 2 conscious minds. Each cortical hemisphere has its own mind, each with its own peculiarities. The left cortex supports normal linguistic processing and speech; the right hemisphere is nearly mute but can read whole words and, in some cases at least, can understand syntax and produce simple speech and song.

It could be countered that language is necessary for the proper development of consciousness but that once this has taken place, language is no longer needed to experience. This hypothesis is difficult to address comprehensively, as it would require raising a child under severe social deprivation.

2020-10-31: Electromagnetic Consciousness

It’s far too early to claim that the brain’s electromagnetic fields are the primary seat of consciousness with much confidence. But philosophers and neuroscientists who have proposed electromagnetic field theories of consciousness, of which my own General Resonance Theory is one variety, are building up evidence.

2022-07-18: Bee cognition

Bees can count, recognize images of human faces and learn simple tool use and abstract concepts. He thinks bees have emotions, can plan and imagine things, and can recognize themselves as unique entities distinct from other bees. When Chittka deliberately trained a “demonstrator bee” to carry out a task in a sub-optimal way, the “observer bee” would not simply ape the demonstrator and copy the action she had seen, but would spontaneously improve her technique to solve the task more efficiently “without any kind of trial and error”. He thinks the level of sophisticated cognition bees exhibit means it’s unlikely they do not feel any emotions at all.

2023-07-08: Adversarial collaborations

What helped resolve the wager was the outcome, or rather the lack of a decisive outcome, of an “adversarial collaboration” organized by a consortium called COGITATE. Adversarial collaborations encourage researchers from different theoretical camps to jointly design experiments that can distinguish between their theories. In this case, the theories in question were integrated information theory (IIT), the brainchild of Giulio Tononi, and the neuronal  global workspace theory (GWT), championed by Stanislas Dehaene. The 2 scientists made predictions, based on their respective theories, about what kinds of brain activity would be recorded in an experiment in which participants looked at a series of images—but neither predicted outcome fully played out.

The Seoul of a New Machine

Rity is the ghost in the machine: an autonomous agent that can transfer itself into desktop computers, PDAs, servers and robotic avatars, and adapt and evolve like a genetic organism. As researchers go from place to place, they are captured and recognized by a network of cameras in the building, allowing Rity to follow them from computer to computer.The “sobot” can upload itself into a mobile robot — a simpler cousin of HanSaRam called MyBot — and follow Kuppuswamy from room to room on its servo-controlled wheels, fetching objects for the researcher with its mechanical arms. If it sees Kuppuswamy sit in front of his office PC, Rity can abandon MyBot like a husk and slip into the desktop machine, to better put itself at its human master’s disposal.

when i was in school, ai was all about embodiment. now we have a more fluid, body-snatching approach. an agent following you around, without being limited to one manifestation, is both very scifi and very interesting

Intelligence means Prediction

The cortex appears wired at its foundation to run Bayesian computations as efficiently as can be possible.

now i REALLY have to cram bayesian math.
2008-09-27:
s/Intelligence is defined by behavior/Intelligence is defined by prediction/

2017-09-06:

Surfing Uncertainty isn’t pop science and isn’t easy reading. Sometimes it’s on the border of possible-at-all reading. Author Andy Clark (a professor of logic and metaphysics, of all things!) is clearly brilliant, but prone to going on long digressions about various boring scholarly debates. In particular, he’s obsessed with showing how “embodied” everything is all the time. This gets kind of awkward, since the predictive processing model isn’t really a natural match for embodiment theory, and describes a brain which is pretty embodied in some ways but not-so-embodied in others. If you want 100 pages of apologia along the lines of “this may not look embodied, but if you squint you’ll see how super-duper embodied it really is!”, this is your book.

2018-11-30: Free energy principle

Friston’s work has 2 primary motivations. Sure, it would be nice to see the free energy principle lead to true artificial consciousness someday, but that’s not one of his top priorities. Rather, his first big desire is to advance schizophrenia research, to help repair the brains of patients like the ones he knew at the old asylum. And his second main motivation is “much more selfish.” It goes back to that evening in his bedroom, as a teenager, looking at the cherry blossoms, wondering, “Can I sort it all out in the simplest way possible?”

and a piece on Friston:

Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.

2019-07-18:

We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities

2022-04-10:

If that is not mind-bending enough, in his new book, Jeff Hawkins extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”. Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. “The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time. There isn’t another way to learn. Every time we take a step, move a limb, move our eyes, tilt our head, or utter a sound, the input from our sensors change. For example, our eyes make rapid movements, called saccades, about three times a second. With each saccade, our eyes fixate on a new point in the world and the information from the eyes to the brain changes completely.” We don’t perceive any of this because we are living in the model, which is predicting the next input to come, across all the senses. “Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement. Only by moving can we learn a model of the object.”

“To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. We are not aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs.”

“Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time (about 2% of the total). Individual neurons can participate in many different thoughts or experiences. Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were not previously connected.”

Sequence memory (like predicting the next note in a melody or a common sequence of behaviors): “Sequence memory is also used for language. Recognizing a spoken work is like recognizing a short melody.”

Sophonts

Do some elephants, at some age, develop the ability to think far into the future and pass the wisdom to their young? That is, is the incidence of “culture” among elephants the result of intellectual prognostication? No. If you eliminated all adult elephants, would the current “civilized” state of elephant culture eventually re-emerge after a number of generations? If so, after how many generations? Yes, with caveats.

Joshua riffs on the possible origins of the elephant society. Go read this article on elephant violence. It has the qualities of a seminal piece on cross-species relations. Consider this statement from a ugandan researcher who grew up in a war zone:

I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants. I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the 2. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed – no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.
Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.

Now we can either discuss the semantics of sentience as we recognize our peer species, hopefully before it is too late, or we can adopt a new term that is not laden with meaning that needs to be repurposed first. Sophonts works for me: Why look at far away stars when we can find peers right under our nose?

2006-10-30: another hurdle cleared

Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness

2007-12-30: More sophonts, unsurprisingly.

As recently as 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom doubted that even chimpanzees, which are more closely related to human beings than are monkeys, possessed theory of mind. This view is changing

2013-12-30: All sophont teenagers are the same

Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around

2014-02-03: How is your self-definition of your human identity going?

This study describes how 3 individual fish developed a novel behavior and learnt to use a dorsally attached external tag to activate a self-feeder. This behavior was repeated up to several 100x, and over time these fish fine-tuned the behavior and made a series of goal-directed coordinated movements needed to attach the feeder’s pull string to the tag and stretch the string until the feeder was activated. These observations demonstrate a capacity in cod to develop a novel behavior utilizing an attached tag as a tool to achieve a goal. This may be seen as one of the very few observed examples of innovation and tool use in fish.”

2014-10-09: a preview of the legal climate as we uplift various sophonts.

A New York appeals court will consider this week whether chimpanzees are entitled to “legal personhood” in the first case of its kind.

2015-07-02: Meaning in bird song

A study of the chestnut-crowned babbler bird from Australia revealed a method of communicating that has never before been observed in animals. The bird combines sounds in different combinations to convey meaning. “It is the first evidence outside of a human that an animal can use the same meaningless sounds in different arrangements to generate new meaning. It’s a very basic form of word generation – I’d be amazed if other animals can’t do this too.” Babbler birds were found to combine 2 sounds (known as A and B) to generate calls associated with specific behaviors. In flight, they used an “A-B” call to make their whereabouts known, but when alerting chicks to food they combined the sounds differently to make “B-A-B”. The birds seemed to understand the meaning of the calls. When the feeding call was played back to them, they looked at nests, while when they heard a flight call they looked at the sky

2016-03-21:  Ants recognize themselves

Our observations suggest that some ants can recognize themselves when confronted with their reflection view, this potential ability not necessary implicating some self awareness.

2022-02-17: Elks understand property?

Elk in Utah are smart enough to move off of public lands (where they can be hunted) and on to private lands where they cannot. And then, when hunting season is over, they shift right back to public lands. Elks’ use of public land diminished by 30% by the middle of rifle season. “It’s crazy; on the opening day of the hunt, they move, and on the closing day they move back. It’s almost like they’re thinking, ‘Oh, all these trucks are coming, it’s opening day, better move.’ They understand death. They get it; they’ve figured it out.”

2022-02-23: Chimpanzees treating their own wounds

Never before have scientists observed chimpanzees (or any animal) essentially “treating” a wound or applying a different animal species to a wound. It’s likely an example of allo-medication behavior (medicating others) in apes, which has never been seen before. The chimpanzees caught an insect from the air, which they immobilized by squeezing it between their lips. Then they placed it on an exposed surface of the wound and moved it around using their fingertips or lips. Finally, they extracted the insect from the wound.

2023-09-29: Crow statistical reasoning

2 crows had to choose between 2 images, each corresponding to a different reward probability. Crows were tasked with learning rather abstract quantities (i.e., not whole numbers), associating them with abstract symbols, and then applying that combination of information in a reward maximizing way. Over 10 days of training and 5k trials, the 1 crows continued to pick the higher probability of reward, showing their ability to use statistical inference.

Autonomous weapons

A proposal would give “armed autonomous systems” the authority to shoot to destroy hostile weapon systems but not suspected combatants.

2006-10-17: Lethal robots

South Korea just unveiled the first generation of autonomous robots armed with lethal weapons. They’ll eventually be deployed to help secure their 250 km border with North Korea, and they come equipped with rubber bullets and machine guns.

2007-04-15: Mr Carr is suddenly tackling a lot meatier subjects than the latest web 2.0 bore

we’ve come to an important juncture in the history of warfare in which military robots will increasingly have the ability to autonomously select and destroy targets without human guidance.

2007-05-08: Soldier-robot love

soldiers who award “purple hearts” to their bomb-defusing robots that get injured; soldiers who describe in details the personality quirks of their ‘bots; soldiers that take their robots on furlough, to give them “rest”.

2007-08-25: Recon Scout

Throw it through a window or over a wall, then remotely maneuver it using the portable operator control unit. You’ll get immediate real-time video that will let you plan and act with confidence. Before you send in your team, send in your Recon Scout.

2008-01-12: iRobot Army Contract. The same company that builds the cuddly roombas also builds combat robots.. When the revolution comes, it might come from hello kitty lookalikes brandishing weapons
2009-04-11: The state of military robots, drones and UAVs, and their consequences.

2011-11-04: Automating assassinations

Here’s how drones are changing warfare:

An Assassination List.
Drones make it easy to rapidly find and kill people. As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems. It has become so popular that the process has become automated through an assassination list. The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.

Signature Strikes.
The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas. Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown.

Borders melt.
Nearly every country in the world can be penetrated with drones. In most cases, they don’t know they’ve been penetrated. In others, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it.
there is no single person who has oversight over the whole program, including the president. and you have contractors needing to make quota for target identification… what could possibly go wrong?

2011-12-17: The first manhunt/arrest of a US citizen via a Predator drone

+

The design, prototype implementation, and demonstration of an ethical governor capable of restricting lethal action of an autonomous system in a manner consistent with the Laws of War.

= ?

2012-01-21: More on the kill lists

a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we’re assured are bad and who are sometimes US citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process.

2012-02-17: Once drones are fully autonomous, what are you gonna do with all the type 2 diabetes pilots in nevada? Perhaps you repurpose them as front-line grunts.

“the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

2012-03-14: Drone assassination

2012-11-30: UAhelicopters. Maybe this can make the manhattan heli tours affordable?

Autonomous piloting of an Apache helicopter.

2013-05-16: Self-aiming Rifle. Here, have some future shock on this nice day.

This device is sure to provoke controversy, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally novel to me: rather, it’s the compact, portable version of something we’ve seen for years in naval point gunnery systems such as AEGIS and PHALANX. Basically, this is an almost entirely automated gunnery platform: you look through the scope and select a target, and pull the trigger to tell it to fire on its own mark; then it waits for a clean shot and takes it. A first-time shooter can reliably hit targets at a range of 450m, which is no big surprise, since the shooter isn’t actually doing much of the work at all: this is an automated gun system.

Thinking of this in the range of applications: for hunting as a sport, it kind of defeats the purpose of the “sport” aspect. (Especially if you added just a bit more logic to help it identify deer or whatever on its own, and just ping the operator for confirmation before taking a shot) It’s basically an automated killing device. For hunting for survival, it would certainly be effective, although if you’re using a device this fancy then perhaps you have more efficient means at your disposal of getting food.

Its main application, AFAICT, is as a sniper’s weapon, where this could be tremendously powerful. A system like this could likely improve the single-shot accuracy of even an experienced scout/sniper, and combined with an even longer-ranged weapon like a BMG, it could become robotic death at a distance.

What’s perhaps more alarming is that it would turn absolutely any random person into the equivalent of a moderately skilled sniper, and I cannot think of any chain of events that begins with this that doesn’t end really, really, badly.

The other important thing about this is that there are obvious extensions possible with this technology: with just a bit more AI logic to identify candidate targets (and, presumably, check with a human before taking shots), you could turn this into a fully autonomous point defense platform that just sits there and kills any targets of a certain category that it sees. It would be awfully effective at it, too. The delayed-triggering technology could be combined with high-ROF-capable guns to produce a sort of deadlier version of a machine gun: rather than firing rounds off as fast as possible, and losing significant accuracy due to the motion of the gun, it has an eye strapped to the barrel which means that it only fires each round when it’s pointed at a target. A weapon of this sort could be as much deadlier than a machinegun as a machinegun is deadlier than a repeating rifle. Combined with a base that can move itself to improve shooting vantage, you have a killer robot. (Imagine mounting this device on, say, a Boston Dynamics BigDog, or a small UAV) But even without that, it could make infantry motion through surveyable spaces as impractical as massed infantry charges against machine-gun posts, by simply picking off anyone who is visible for even a moment.

The key innovation is that the sort of advanced tracking technology we saw decades ago with the AEGIS is now mountable on a single rifle, rather than on a large weapons system. This allows unprecedented accuracy and versatility of mounting.

As a military weapon, this could reshape the battlefield, and possibly be the start of the end of the use of infantry. This is a weirdly mixed development; if sending individual people to kill people becomes impractical, it means that warfare will focus instead much more on mass weapons such as bombs and chemicals. But infantry is where most of the people involved in a war get killed, so this could have the perverse result (after, perhaps, one or 2 wars in which people learn just why infantry doesn’t work as well) of greatly reducing the human cost of war.

As a civilian device, OTOH, this is completely insane. I’d rather have people walking around with hand grenades. This is alarming enough on the battlefield; having cities full of people with automated sniping platforms is a spectacular disaster waiting to happen.

(As a side note, this thing has WiFi on it. How thoroughly has its system security been vetted? On the list of things that I do not want unauthorized access to, “automated sniper rifle” is pretty close to the top.)

2014-03-26: Flying military vehicles

Advanced Tactics Inc, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.

2015-07-27: Autonomous Weapons Ban

More than 1000 leading AI and robotics researchers and others, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, just signed and published an open letter from the Future of Life Institute today calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons.

FLI defines “autonomous weapons” as those that select and engage targets without human intervention, such as armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain predefined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.

The researchers believe that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is feasible within years, not decades, and that the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

2015-10-16: Battlefield 2050

The diverse set of workshop participants painted a vivid picture of the battlefield of 2050, one that brought reality more in line with the science fiction and fantasy the public is accustomed to viewing in the cinema and reading about. A time traveler from today would be immediately taken with the “over-crowding” of the battlefield of 2050 populated by all manner of robots, robots that greatly outnumber human fighters, and robot-looking humans

2016-01-14: Skeye Pico Drone. It seems fairly certain that the clandestine sector has far smaller drones by now

2016-04-12: Being on a kill list

I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.

2016-09-06: on the likely futile efforts to ban fully autonomous weapons via un talk shops.

Forget about drones, forget about dystopian scifi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.

2017-01-11: Glimpses from our grim meathook future

The test consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from 3 F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.

2017-02-22: Drone wars have begun

A pair of Islamic State fighters in desert camouflage climbed to the top of a river bluff in northern Iraq to demonstrate an important new weapon: a small drone, with swept wings and a small bomb tucked in its fuselage. The 2 men launched the slender machine and took videos from a second, smaller drone that shadowed its movements. The aircraft glided over the besieged city of Mosul, swooped close to an Iraqi army outpost and dropped its bomb, scattering Iraqi troops with a small blast that left 1 figure sprawled on the ground, apparently dead or wounded.

2017-07-23: Drone Warfare ROI

The Ukrainian SBU now believes that the destruction of an arms depot at Balakliya that did $1b in damage was carried out by a small drone armed with a thermite grenade. That’s an ROI of $500k for every $1 invested

2017-08-17: Dubstep works surprisingly well for killer drones.

2017-09-20: Yes, lasers shooting down drones are now a thing. I’m very amused by all the physics-challenged people in the comments who suggest that you can dodge the lasers.

2018-03-14: This won’t be funny in a few years. You may want to read up on An Ethical Governor for Constraining Lethal Action in an Autonomous System

Speaking at a hastily called White House press conference Friday, a visibly tense and perspiring President Barack Obama confessed that the United States’ fleet of 700 armed drones have been conducting airstrikes entirely on their own for the past several years.

2018-06-24: Future drone swarms

Future war could like a lot like Ender’s Game. This would be billions of tons of hypersonic drones combined with a variety of super-weapons. There will not be the million fold chasm between chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. There could be a smoother range of power using magnetic power storage, kinetic weapons, nanotechnology enhancement to achieve and eventually exceeding nuclear energy and nuclear weapon systems.

2018-12-03: Seeing ballistic missiles

Despite these and other advantages, Scharre does not want the military ever to turn over judgment to computers. To make his case, he offers compelling real-life cases in which human judgment was essential for preventing needless killing, such as his own experiences in Afghanistan. “A young girl of maybe 5 or 6 headed out of the village and up our way, 2 goats in trail. Ostensibly she was just herding goats, but she [was actually] spotting for Taliban fighters.” Scharre’s unit did not shoot. Yes, it would have been legal, but he argues that it would not have been morally right. A robotic sniper following strict algorithms might well have opened fire the second it detected a radio in her hand.

2019-01-10: A DIY shrapnel drone

Video footage captures the moment when an explosive drone, loaded with shrapnel, piloted by Houthi rebels, exploded over a military parade in Yemen. It killed 6 soldiers and injured at least 20 more, including the army’s chief of staff. “Very effective attack. Houthi drone tactics are fascinating. Commonly used to blind Saudi/Coalition radars to cover missile launches (tactic pioneered by Hezbollah vs Israel), sometimes as impromptu cruise missile itself.”

2019-05-09: Automating air to air combat

DARPA is automating air-to-air combat, enabling reaction times at machine speeds and freeing pilots to concentrate on the larger air battle and directing an air wing of drones. Dogfighting will still be rare in the future but it is part of AI and automation taking over all high-end fighting. New human fighter pilots learn to dogfight because it represents a crucible where pilot performance and trust can be refined. To accelerate the transformation of pilots from aircraft operators to mission battle commanders — who can entrust dynamic air combat tasks to unmanned, semi-autonomous airborne assets from the cockpit — the AI must first prove it can handle the basics.

2020-08-21: Stupid fighter jocks are history

In a 5 to 0 sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest today.

2021-03-29: More on superhuman drone swarms

Behind this, there is the military argument. If AI-controlled weapons can defeat those operated by humans, then whoever has the AIs will win and failing to deploy them means accepting defeat.

Debate still swirls around this topic. The emergence of drone swarms and other types of weapon that cannot be defeated by humans alone will crystalize it. However, it is not clear whether the legal argument will be able to keep up with technology, given how long it has already been going on. At this rate, large-scale AI-powered swarm weapons may be used in action before the debate is concluded. The big question is which nations will have them first.

2022-11-26: While not autonomous, this is the most lethal & effective yet.

LANIUS is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition, designed for short-range operation in the urban environment. The system can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.

2023-02-23: DARPA program for massive drone swarms

the goal of AMASS is to develop the capability to launch and command 1000s, perhaps 10000s, of autonomous drones, working together to destroy a multitude of an enemy’s defenses, including air defense, indirect and precision weapons, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms. The AMASS program is expected to include swarms of multi-domain autonomous vehicles, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs).