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I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it's inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven't already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn't say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

I think we're at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it's only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they'll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

EDIT: I know I'm not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.

Imperialism go brrrrr

Of course, totally not used in combat. That's why they strapped the AR-15 to it. AR-15 famously has no use in combat.

Fewer mistakes might be a side-effect, but the real reason why this will be welcomed by the military and our dear leaders is because they don't have to stir up the public emotionally so that we give up our sons and daughters. It will further reduce our opposition to war because "the only people dying are the bad ones". I can't wait to read how the next model will reduce the false positive rate with another percentage point. Of course, I think it requires little imagination or intellect to figure out what the net result will be when the most noteworthy information we get from a war is the changelog from its soldiers, who have zero emotional response to taking a life.

Just like tasers were introduced to reduce gun incidents and are now often used as a form of cattle prod, they will function creep the shit out of this, and our adaptation to the idea of robots doing the killing will be over before we've perfected the technology.

It was unavoidable though, someone always has to have the biggest gun. It's not our technological advancement that has to adapt to our mentality, we have to adapt to technological advancement. Perhaps the nuclear bomb was simply not frightening enough to change our ways.