Loitering munitions are basically our version of t-800. It’s also not fun thinking if you have ever contributed to any computer vision open source projects and wondering if your code somehow ended up inside a loitering munitions drone because Iran who don’t bother to respect the GPL decided to use those open source libraries in their drone’s targeting system and deploy them in Ukraine. Maybe I’m just overthinking things, but would you lose some sleep knowing your code become a critical part of an autonomous system that can decide to kill people on their own without a direct human input?
I don’t think it’s exactly the same. Now if the hammer has a mind of its own and can loiter in an alley and can decide to kill a passerby or not based on its own judgement. e.g. the owner told the hammer to kill passerby wearing blue shirt, and the hammer does it but has 0.1% chance of killing people wearing yellow shirt due to computer vision quirks. Does the responsibility of killing people wearing yellow shirt fell partially to the blacksmith? Did the blacksmith can sleep soundly knowing people wearing yellow shirt might not need to die if his programming is a little bit more better, even though he never sold the hammer for the purpose of killing people in the first place (it’s his customer that abuse it).
I once asked some of my friends what they were up to at work.
An accountant friend said “I’m making a VBA macro to restructure and convert our customer’s XML data into an SQL transaction so that we can import it into our accounting system”.
A car mechanic friend said: “I’m trying to find the pinout for this obscure ECU so that I can flash in this profile that I’ve tweaked with hex editor”
A teacher friend said: “I’m setting up integration between moodle and shopify so that we wouldn’t have to enroll our students manually”.
And every time my response was “YOU WHAT NOW? You should work in IT”
And they always responded with something along the lines of “Yeah, nah, I’m not that smart”
And here I am, slapping webpages and forms together, earning more than all of them combined. That’s really unfair, but I’m not in a position to complain.
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