Reddit reviews Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

I have a pretty wide probability distribution over the year for the first creation of superhuman AI, with a mode around 2060 (conditioning on no other existential catastrophes hitting us first). Many AI people predict superhuman AI sooner than this, though — including Rich Sutton, who quite literally wrote the book on reinforcement learning.

Once AI can drive cars better than humans can, then humanity will decide that driving cars was something that never required much "intelligence" in the first place, just like they did with chess. So I don't think driverless cars will cause people to believe that superhuman AI is coming soon — and it shouldn't, anyway.

When the military has fully autonomous battlefield robots, or a machine passes an in person Turing test, then people will start taking AI seriously.

Amusing note: Some military big-shots say things like "We'll never build fully-autonomous combat AIs; we'll never take humans out of the loop" (see Wired for War). Meanwhile, the U.S. military spends millions to get roboticist Ronald Arkin and his team to research and write the book Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots. (One of the few serious works in the field of "machine ethics", BTW.)

For more on this topic, I highly recommend P. W. Singer's "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century." It's a bit dated since the technology has come so far since 2009, but he does a good job of weighing the pros and cons of lethal technologies like robots and drones.

Two of his main points:

1. Shouldn't we do everything we possibly can to protect the good guys?
   
   
2. Is it too easy to go to war now that we don't have to risk human lives?
   
   I think the use of drones to defeat domestic bad guys still satisfies the first question, but I'm not sure how it relates to the second question, especially since we have a reason to use non-lethal force in domestic situations. I think it's a very valid discussion.

It will be like this.

The drone revolution is something that isn't discussed enough. Our ethics of conflict are now completely outdated, as is our combat paradigm. PW Singer makes a chilling, poignant observation:

• IF armed UAVs are used against legitimate military targets in, say, Libya
  
  
• AND these UAVs are piloted out of the suburbs of Las Vegas, NV
  
  
• THEN is a Libyan car bomb in the Walmart parking lot outside of that air force base in Las Vegas an act of terrorism... or a legitimate military retaliation?
  
  Meanwhile, the volunteer army is rapidly being replaced by the privateer army. We had as many "contractors" in Iraq as we did regulars. Combine that with the rise of the wealthy and you begin to see warfare over private concerns - Cornelius Vanderbilt, after all, bankrolled the invasion of Nicaragua just so he could benefit from the trans-ithsmus canal (that was eventually built in Panama - suck it, Cornelius).
  
  What we're left with is basically a skein of high-tech terrorism that knows no boundaries, where victory belongs to either the most wealthy or the most steadfast. Wealthy nations will resist having their sons and daughters in harm's way, while poor nations will see any retaliation against their erstwhile "overlords in the sky" as legitimate military action. Any casual browsing of Al Jazeera will reveal the deep level of offense felt by the Pakistanis and others against American UAVs and UCAVs; it's one of their main literary threads.
  
  And the wars will be over resources. The demand for potable water is increasing more rapidly than supply, changing climate is depleting the yields of the world's fields and even the Saudis admit we've hit the Hubbert Peak.
  
  Every generation is horrified by the ensuing generation's paradigm for warfare. The next generation will be no different.
  
  TL;DR: High tech vs low tech, everywhere, forever, over things we take for granted right now

Anyone else read Wired for War? It offers some great insight into how technological advances in warfare are affecting modern conflict, in particular how understanding of the changes to psychology lag far behind that of the technology itself.

"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." - Isaac Asimov

Definitely worth a read.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

I'd recommend Wired for War as a pretty great read on some of the ethical implications and current debate on drone use. It covers more of the war-uses than domestic uses but it still raises a lot of the right questions, although it doesn't hit them all square on.

1. Death From Above: The Drone Bombs of the Caliphate

2. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

3. Concerns Mount Over ISIS Making 3D Printed Bombs

4. 3-D Printer Body Armor is Great for the U.S. Army—and Terrorists

The only people who worry about it are those who are interested in the subject so they go read about it. Those with no curiosity in the subject just follow their intuition, and our intuition is calibrated to model the future like the past. I also know fighter pilots who aren't worried about being beaten or replaced by UAVs, even though Wired For War is actually on their professional reading list.

Shit, I didn't realize the drones were autonomous. Thought they were remote controlled. I've just started reading Wired for War, so I'm sure I'll run into it.