Eugine_Nier comments on Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Epiphany 14 June 2013 06:28AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 18 June 2013 12:07:53AM 0 points [-]

One issue is how easy it is to secretly build an army of autonomous drones?

Comment author: Yosarian2 18 June 2013 01:21:02AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 21 June 2013 03:43:04AM 1 point [-]

Why? Just build a large number of non-autonomous drones and then upgrade the software at the last minute.

Comment author: Yosarian2 21 June 2013 08:01:44PM 0 points [-]

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.