Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. Photo: Supplied <\/p>\n
It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc. But could it actually happen? <\/p>\n
At the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's annual conference in Texas last month, a workshop was held on the ethics of AI development and a panel discussed whether or not so-called 'lethal autonomous weapons' should be banned. <\/p>\n
\"There are many arguments, legal, ethical, political and technical for a ban,\" Toby Walsh, head of theOptimisation Research Groupat Australia's research body NICTA and chair of the proceedings, told Fairfax Media. <\/p>\n
\"One that particularly appeals to me is that [autonomous weapons] will lower the barrierto war. If one side can launch an attack, without fear of bodies cominghome, then it is much easier to slip into battle,\" Professor Walsh said. <\/p>\n
Advertisement <\/p>\n
While the advent of drones might already have the bar falling, those in favour of a ban would look to stop a potential arms race in \"killer robots\" before it begins. One the other hand, there are plenty of voices against a ban. <\/p>\n
\"Machines are not inherently dangerous\", said Francesca Rossi, president of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and a participant in the AAAI panel, who points out the huge difference between super-intelligence and sentience. <\/p>\n
\"We should build [autonomous weapons]by specifying all the relevant context for the desired goal to be achieved by the machine. Otherwise, a goal could be reached by violating some basic assumptions on how we want a machine to behave. Since machines are not sentient, their behaviour depends on how a human built them,\"Professor Rossi said. <\/p>\n
The specification of \"all\" relevant context could prove a troublesome task, however, since as Professor Walsh points out, \"many ethical principles that we holdas universal are not\", and ethics and decision-making processes across different cultures vary. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
More: <\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence could encourage war, experts fear<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hollywood fantasy: The reality of AI development is a little more nuanced and a lot less advanced than movies might have us believe. Photo: Supplied It's the theme of so many dystopian sci-fi books and movies: a super intelligent machine in charge of lethal military hardware becomes self-aware and decides to wreak havoc Continue reading