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Yosarian2 comments on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy - Less Wrong
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That's not necessarily a huge issue. If all the major powers agree to not have automated killing drones, and a few minor rogue states (say, Iran) ignore that and develop their own killer drones, then (at least in the near term) that probably won't give them a big enough advantage over semi-autonomous drones controlled by major nations to be a big deal; an Iranian automated drone army probably still isn't a match for the American military, the American military has too many other technological advantages.
On the other hand, if one or more major powers start building large numbers of fully autonomous drones, then everyone is going to. That defiantly sounds like a scenario we should try to avoid, especially since that kind of arms race is something that I could see eventually leading to unfriendly AI.
One issue is how easy it is to secretly build an army of autonomous drones?
Developing the technology in secret is probably quite possible. Large-scale deployment, though, building a large army of them, would probably be quite hard to hide, especially from modern satellite photography and information technology.
Why? Just build a large number of non-autonomous drones and then upgrade the software at the last minute.
I suppose. Would that really give you enough of an advantage to be worth the diplomatic cost, though? The difference between a semi-autonomous Predator drone and a fully-autonomous Predator drone in military terms doesn't seem all that significant.
Now, you could make a type of military unit that would really take advantage of being fully autonomous and have a real advantage, like a fully autonomous air-to-air fighter for example (not really practical to do with semi autonomous drones because of delayed reaction time), but it would seem like that would be much harder to hide.