alt Hacker News"You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"
I realize that's not a great argument and was definitely tongue-in-cheek, but given there's still a lot of debate about the accuracy of AI for far more mundane tasks, my personal perspective is that until we have LLMs and such that are truly, demonstrably far more accurate than humans, with true reasoning and judgement capabilities, they don't belong where lives are at stake.
I wouldn't want an LLM-underpinned machine running anesthesia during a surgery; why would I want an LLM-underpinned military apparatus that is deciding the lives of far more? I wouldn't, not in their current state.
In a hypothetical future where we truly trust incredibly smart AIs or LLMs or whatever "smart" technology it is for driving weaponry, okay - if it's truly necessary; I abhor war and the death and destruction wrought by it.
In my mind, though - even if we get to that future where there's some vastly superior technology to the LLMs we have today, which can judge and reason, then I'll have a bunch of other questions, like understanding the motivations of said technology, because I suspect it'll be something much closer to AGI, and that opens a whole separate can of philosophical worms.
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> "You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"
What if it was the target though? AI may be more capable than we're giving it credit for (especially the AI accessible to the US and other governments). The attack on the girls' school coincided with Purim and I don't believe it was a mistake. I think it was the opening salvo by a radically religious Zionists (Christian and Jewish).
I don't think the biggest problem with AI weapons is that they make "mistakes", I think the biggest problem is that they allow people who want to kill civilians the ability to accurately do just that.
So you would prefer weapons that cannot reason at all?
> "You're absolutely right, that wasn't a military target—it was actually a girls school. It won't happen again!"
Most likely this event happened due to a bad targeting system that wasn't smart enough, if it had a better llm underpinning it (assuming it had any) maybe those lives would have been saved. More reason for more smart people like the author to work on these systems.
Not only that but an AI could follow any orders it is given (whether it hallucinates that's a different story) whereas humans may oppose. The friction of orders having to go through a chain of command through its completion is a feature not a bug and that adds responsibility. AI can take no responsibility by itself and with 'moving fast break things smart weapons' that responsibility can be further shoved under the rug.