[ExI] malevolent machines

[spike]

>. On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Subject: Re: [ExI] malevolent machines

 

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>>.We all know that all of our machines are out to get us and frustrate us
in various ways, but is it really possible?  .

 

Unless there is something really important that I don't know about
computers, it seems to me that having a machine 'wake up' like Mike in
Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, is just absurd.  It does what it is
programmed to do and cannot do anything else.  Any other function is just
some sort of mystical belief that is paradoxically held by hard scientists.
Comments?  billw

 

>.Bill, Most people who study consciousness believe that it is an emergent
quality. Emergence is mysterious in some ways, but well understood in
others. .-Kelly

 

 

For war machinery, it wouldn't need to be emergent to be malevolent.
Imagine for instance a quadruped robot like this one:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

 

The Big Dog is noisy, but we could easily make one that is silent, if we
would accept that it moves slowly.  It would be easy to mount a small
caliber weapon on one of these, outfit it with an infrared detector and
image recognition software, a fairly simple program that instructs it to
walk up to within a couple hundred meters of the enemy encampment in the
night and just shoot anything it recognizes as human or has a human IR
signature.  It could fire off a few dozen rounds, then walk away into the
darkness.

 

There is nothing in this scenario outside of current technological
capability.

 

Something like that would be difficult to defend against.  Its own IR
signature could be minimized, as well as its radar cross section.

 

spike

 

 

 

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