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thomblake comments on Open Thread: March 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Am I the only one to think that no, creating military robots isn't a "good career path" towards friendly AI, because creating military robots is inherently unfriendly to humanity? Especially if you live in the US and know that your robots will be used in aggressive wars against poorer countries. It's some kind of crazy ethical blindness that most Americans seem to have for some reason, where "our guys" are human beings, but arbitrarily chosen foreigners deserve whatever they get... Just like this incident I saw on HN when one guy asked about career prospects working for the occupation force in Iraq, and another answered that it'll be an "amazing and unique experience". You'll note my reply there was much more concise.
There are various arguments that building military robots is bad, but I don't think you've touched on any good ones. When you look at how unreliable human soldiers are on the field, creating military robots just seems like an obvious way to make things better for everyone involved. Fewer American casualties because we're using robots, and fewer civilian casualties because the robots are better at not shooting at civilians.
Also, FWIW, most military robots currently aren't the sort that shoot people - they do things like look around corners, draw fire, perform aerial surveillance, and detect/defuse bombs.
This is ironic. I wrote:
Then you wrote:
This happens to pixel-perfectly demonstrate my point about ethical blindness. Reread my quote again, then your quote, then mine, then yours again. Notice anything wrong? Anything missing?
You see, you omitted one pretty important group: everyone America calls "enemy combatants". If you think all of them are bad people and deserve to die, then you obviously don't get it. Repeat after me: America Starts Aggressive Wars. Then say it again because it's true and truth won't suffer from repetition. Say it as many times as you need to make it sink in, then come back and we will resume this discussion.
America will be killing those people with or without robots. We already have ways of wiping all of the enemy combatants off the map if we want to (for example nukes). Military technology is primarily about finding ways to 1) kill fewer of our own soldiers and 2) kill fewer people who aren't enemy combatants.
Not necessarily. All else equal, the less it costs to wage a war (in money, American lives, and good will), the more more likely leaders are to actually start one.
Ignoring the question whether that's desirable or not (politics is the mindkiller) reducing the cost of killing those people will lead to more of those people killed in marginal situations where such considerations matter.
Yes, that's one of the good arguments against robot soliders I mentioned above. We're more likely to not care about the fate of our robot soliders, and so would be less hesitant to send them into battle. Though it's still an open question whether that effect would trump any increased monetary cost per soldier (if any) and whether the other benefits outweigh such concerns.
Human soldiers perform horribly in terms of following the rules of war, and above that do absolutely horrible things sometimes.
Also, this is definitely not the place to debate this, and you have to know a lot of people won't agree with you, so stop with the flamebait.
You don't even have to go as far as "America Starts Aggressive Wars" -- "Under the right conditions, America is capable of starting aggressive wars, and is more likely to do so if the cost of doing so is lowered."
Look, I get the "Politics is the Mind Killer" mantra, and I agree that it would be fruitless to start a debate about something like abortion here -- it comes down to definitions and conventions about what is moral.
But when something is actually, demonstrably, true, refusing to look at and examine the truth because it is painful to do so is not compelling. It doesn't even trigger most of the reasons in "politics is the mindkiller" -- both major U.S. Political parties are just fine with most of the examples. The only two teams that can credibly be put in opposition here are "U.S.A." and "Everyone else".
It is worth noting that to complete the argument someone needs to show that America starting aggressive wars is bad. The people starting such wars, it turns out, have their reasons.
[half-ironic] Yep. Some countries are just in desperate need a good ol' fashioned ass-kicking. [/half-ironic]
Why flamebait? I stated a very well-known fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Pigs_Invasion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Power_Pack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Urgent_Fury
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Just_Cause
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_sponsored_regime_change
ETA: to tell the truth, until I dug up that last Wikipedia page just now for purposes of argument, I still had no clear idea how much this happened. And give these people autonomous killer robots? In the name of developing Friendly Intelligence?
1) Politics is the mind killer, 2) Agree denotationally but not connotationally
Bay of Pigs? Really? How about nailing us on the Philippines while you're at it. :-)
It isn't like there aren't recent examples to choose from.
That's why. Folks will disagree that's something that the US does, and pointing to things the US might have done decades ago won't convince them. There's no way to even debate this point without going down a potentially mind-killing rabbit hole, and I find it hard to believe you weren't aware of this when you posted it.
In case you weren't aware of it: I live in the US, and I've talked to a number of ordinary folks and a number of scholarly folks about it, and I don't tend to encounter people who would grant that the US starts aggressive wars. You should be able to see why someone who thinks that would be angry and vocal about the accusation.
Ooh... I thought we were having a factual disagreement. I apologize. Maybe this won't work as flamebait here :-)