A new TED talk video just came out by Daniel Suarez, author of Daemon, explaining how autonomous combat drones with a capability called "lethal autonomy" pose a threat to democracy. Lethal autonomy is what it sounds like - the ability of a robot to kill a human without requiring a human to make the decision.
He explains that a human decision-maker is not a necessity for combat drones to function. This has potentially catastrophic consequences, as it would allow a small number of people to concentrate a very large amount of power, ruining the checks and balances of power between governments and their people and the checks and balances of power between different branches of government. According to Suarez, about 70 countries have begun developing remotely piloted drones (like predator drones), the precursor to killer robots with lethal autonomy.
Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot
One thing he didn't mention in this video is that there's a difference in obedience levels between human soldiers and combat drones. Drones are completely obedient but humans can throw a revolt. Because they can rebel, human soldiers provide some obstacles to limit the power that would-be tyrants could otherwise obtain. Drones won't provide this type of protection whatsoever. Obviously, relying on human decision making is not perfect. Someone like Hitler can manage to convince people to make poor ethical choices - but still, they need to be convinced, and that requirement may play a major role in protecting us. Consider this - it's unthinkable that today's American soldiers might suddenly decide this evening to follow a tyrannical leader whose goal is to have total power and murder all who oppose. It is not, however, unthinkable at all that the same tyrant, if empowered by an army of combat drones, could successfully launch such an attack without risking a mutiny. The amount and variety of power grabs a tyrant with a robot army of sufficient power can get away with is unlimited.
Something else he didn't mention is that because we can optimize technologies more easily than we can optimize humans, it may be possible to produce killer robots in less time than it takes to build armies of human soldiers and with less expense than training and paying those soldiers. Considering the salaries and benefits paid to soldiers and the 18 year wait time on human development, it is possible that an overwhelmingly large army of killer robots could be built more quickly than human armies and with fewer resources.
Suarez's solution is to push for legislation that makes producing robots with lethal autonomy illegal. There are, obviously, pros and cons to this method. Another method (explored in Daemon) is that if the people have 3-D printers, then the people may be able to produce comparable weapons which will then check and balance their government's power. This method has pros and cons as well. I came up with a third method which is here. I think it's better than the alternatives but I would like more feedback.
As far as I know, no organization, not even MIRI (I checked), is dedicated to preventing the potential political disasters caused by near-term tool AI (MIRI is interested in the existential risks posed by AGI). That means it's up to us - the people - to develop our understanding of this subject and spread the word to others. Of all the forums on the internet, LessWrong is one of the most knowledgeable when it comes to artificial intelligence, so it's a logical place to fire up a discussion on this. I searched LessWrong for terms like "checks and balances" and "Daemon" and I just don't see evidence that we've done a group discussion on this issue. I'm starting by proposing and exploring some possible solutions to this problem and some pros and cons of each.
To keep things organized, let's put each potential solution, pro and con into a separate comment.
Possible Solution:
This sounds hard to implement because it would require co-operation from a lot of people, but if the alternative is that our technological progress means we are facing possible extinction (with the 3-D printer solution) or oppression (with the legislation "solution"), that might get most of the world interested in putting the effort into it.
Here's how I imagine it could work:
First, everyone concerned forms an alliance. This would have to be a very big alliance all over the world.
The alliance makes distinctions between weapons likely to threaten humanity and weapons likely to protect humanity from itself. For an over-simplified definition (to give you the gist):
Weapons that are likely to protect humanity from itself: These are not useful for dominating a population unless a very, very large number of people use them. Example: Guns.
Weapons that threaten humanity: Any weapon that could be used by a few to dominate many. (And there are more kinds.)
The alliance makes a law saying that anyone found building humanity-threatening weapons will be stopped by the alliance. (We're kind of doing this already, but the next part is different).
In order to make such a policy enforceable, somebody will need to have some weapons with which to control those who break the weapon law the way that we have police with guns. Selecting a small number of people to police the illegal weapon makers and giving the police weapons powerful enough to stop them would make the problem far, far worse. That would be adopting the same failure mode as Russian communism: Give all the power to a few and expect them to distribute their power to the many? Distribution is not the outcome we should anticipate. See the next point for how I think we could do this.
Design only weapons meant to protect humanity from itself, and ensure that a very large percentage of the world's populations have these weapons (so that they aren't in the hands of the few). The reason they can overwhelm the potentially superior weapons is because there are so many more weapons being wielded. Essentially, everybody becomes the police.