Near-Term Risk: Killer Robots a Threat to Freedom and Democracy

This issue is not one I expect to have any influence over.

I don't expect to have a large influence over it, but for a small investment, I make a small difference. You said once yourself that if your life could make even a miniscule difference to the probability that humanity survives, it would be worth it. And if a 1/4,204,800 sized fraction of my life makes a 0.000000001% difference in the chance that humanity doesn't lose democracy, that's worth it to me. Looking at it that way, does my behavior make sense?

It is also the kind of of game where belief in doomsday predictions is enough to make people (or even a cause) lose credibility.

Ok. I feel like you should be saying that to yourself - you're the one who said you thought the 3-D printer idea would result in everyone dying. I think the worst thing I said is that killer robots are a threat to democracy. Did you find something in my writing that you pattern matched to "doomsday prediction"? If so, I will need an example.

Evangelism is not my thing. Even if it was, this wouldn't be the cause I chose to champion.

Spending 1/4,204,800 of my life to spread the word about something is best categorized as "doing my part" not "championing a cause". Like I said in my last comment:

"I have no intentions of dedicating my life to this issue."

After considering the amount of time I spent on this and the clear statement of my intentions (or lack of intentions), do you agree that I was never trying to champion this cause and was simply doing my part, wedrifid?

Democracy is imperfect, but dictatorships are worse.

As for humans needing to be employed : autonomous return fire drones are going to be very expensive to build and maintain. That "expense" means that the labor of thousands is needed somewhere in the process.

I honestly don't think this is the case. Hobbyists working on their own with limited budgets have made autonomous paintball guns, as well as all sorts of other robots and UAVs. Conceivably robots could be incredibly cheap, much much cheaper than the average soldier.

Developing the technology in secret is probably quite possible. Large-scale deployment, though, building a large army of them, would probably be quite hard to hide, especially from modern satellite photography and information technology.

Almost certainly, but the point that stationary counter-drones wouldn't necessarily be in a symmetric situation to counter-counter-drones holds. Just swap in a different attack/defense method.

This amounts to dismissing Suarez's proposal to make autonomous killer robots illegal as absurd.

Yeah, I got that, and I think that his statement is easy to understand so I'm not sure why you're explaining that to me. If you hadn't noticed this, I wrote out various cons for the legislation idea which were either identical in meaning to his statement or along the same lines as "making them illegal is absurd". He got several points for that and his comment put at the top of the page. I wrote them first and was evidently ignored (by karma clickers if not by you).

This isn't saying we need drones (or counter or counter-counter drones). It rather saying:

I didn't say that he was saying that either.

This wouldn't be any form of formal agreement. Instead, people who are certain to lose tend to be less likely to get into fights.

I agree that a formal agreement would be meaningless here, but that people will make a cost-benefit analysis when choosing whether to fight is so obvious I didn't think he was talking about that - it doesn't seem like a thing that needs saying. Maybe what he meant was not "people will decide whether to fight based on whether it's likely to succeed" or "people will make formal agreements" but something more like "using killer robots would increase the amount or quality of data we have in a significant way and this will encourage that kind of decision-making".

What if that's not the case, though? What if having a proliferation of deadly technologies makes it damned near impossible to figure out who is going to win? That could result in a lot more wars...

Now "the great filter" comes to mind again. :|

Do you know of anyone who has written about:

A. Whether it is likely for technological advancement to make it significantly more difficult to figure out who will win wars. B. Whether it's more likely for people to initiate wars when there's a lot of uncertainty.

We might be lucky - maybe people are far less likely to initiate wars if it isn't clear who will win... I'd like to read about this topic if there's information on it.

What do you disagree strongly with? My speculation that you would need fewer people to control them? I'm not sure about that so if you can bring in a good argument you can change my view on that.

Terrorists are not our problem (in general and in this specific state). Terrorists with nukes cannot feasably control a country with them.

I am talking about people that have easy access to drones and want to control a country with them. Traditional totalitarian techniques plus drones is what I am really worried about, not terrorists.

So I admit that with "a few people with drones vs. nukes" I thought about a (close to) worst case. Obviously some low tech terrorists in Afghanistan are not a real substantial problem when they control drones, but high military officials with power fantasies are. Of course rouge states with drones are even more dangerous...

A Predator drone requires more people to run it - fuelling, arming, polishing the paint - than a fighter aircraft does.

It does? I would've guessed the exact opposite and that the difference would be by a large margin: drones are smaller, eliminate all the equipment necessary to support a human, don't have to be man-rated, and are expected to have drastically less performance in terms of going supersonic or executing high-g maneuvers.

Would you happen to be able to provide these figures:

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the current generation of weapons.

The ratio of human resources-to-firepower on the weapons used during eras where oppression was common.

I'd like to compare them.

Hmm, "firepower" is vague. I think the relevant number here would be something along the lines of how many people can be killed or subdued in a conflict situation.

Excuse me? You are taking the number of military-age males and using it as the number of soldiers!

Yes!

The actual US armed forces are a few million. 5% would be a much better estimate.

If the question here is "How many people are currently in the military" my figure is wrong. However, that's not the question. The question is "In the event that a robot army tries to take over the American population, how many American soldiers might there be to defend America?" You're estimating in a different context than the one in my comment.

This aside, you are ignoring that "lethal autonomy" is nowhere near the same thing as "operational autonomy"

Actually, if you're defining "operational autonomy" as "how many people it takes to run weapons", I did address that when I said "I'm not sure how many maintenance people and logistics people it would require, but even if we double that .22%, we still have only .44%." If you have better estimates, would you share them?

How? "Do as I say, or else I'll order you to fire up the drones on your base and have them shoot you!"

Method A. They could wait until the country is in turmoil and prey on people's irrationality like Hitler did.

Method B. They could get those people to operate the drones under the guise of fighting for a good cause. Then they could threaten to use the army to kill anyone who opposes them. This doesn't have to be sudden - it could happen quite gradually, as a series of small and oppressive steps and rules wrapped in doublespeak that eventually lead up to complete tyranny. If people don't realize that most other people disagree with the tyrant, they will feel threatened and probably comply in order to survive.

Method C. Check out the Milgram experiment. Those people didn't even need to be coerced to apply lethal force. It's a lot easier than you think.

Method D. If they can get just a small group to operate a small number of drones, they can coerce a larger group of people to operate more drones. With the larger group of people operating drones, they can coerce even more people, and so on.

Why will that work better with drones than with rifles?

This all depends on the ratio of people it takes to operate the weapons vs. number of people the weapons can subdue. Your perception appears to be that predator drones require more people to run them than a fighter aircraft. My perception is that it doesn't matter how many people it takes to operate a predator drone because war technology is likely to be optimized further than it is today, and if it is possible to decrease the number of people it requires to build/maintain/run/etc. the killer robots significantly below the number of people it would take to get the same amount of firepower otherwise, then of course they can take over a population more easily.

A high firepower to human resource ratio means takeovers would work better.

A lethally-autonomous robot is just a weapon whose operator is well out of range at the moment of killing.

That's not what Suarez says. Even if he's wrong do you deny that it's likely that technology will advance to the point where people can make robots capable of killing without a human making the decision? That's what this conversation is about. Don't let us get all mixed up like Eliezer warns us about in 37 ways words can be wrong. If we're talking about robots that can kill without a human's decision, those are a threat, and could potentially reduce the human resources-to-firepower ratio enough to threaten democracy. If you want to disagree with me about what words I should use to speak about this, that's great. In that case, though, I'd like to know where your credible sources are so that I can read authoritative definitions please.

and you still have to convince the people doing the work that it needs to be done.

Hitler.

Milgram experiment.

Number of sociopaths: 1 in 20.

Is rationality taught in school?: No.

This is implausible. There is no conceivable motive for people to support the hypothetical robot army; there is not a chance in hell that 1.5 million people would voluntarily build a robot army for a tyrant, who doesn't have the many trillions of dollars needed to pay them (since nobody has that much money)

For a start, I don't believe you. People have done comparable things for tyrants in the past (complete albeit probably inefficient dedication of the resources of the given tribe to the objectives of the tyrant---horseback archers and small moustaches spring to mind). But that isn't the primary problem here.

The primary problem would be with a country creating the army in the usual way that a country creates an army but that once owned this army would be much easier for an individual (or a few) to control. It makes it easier for such people to become tyrants and once they are to retain their power. This kind of thing (a general seizing control by use of his control of the military) is not unusual for humans. Killer robots make it somewhat easier. Controlling many humans is complicated and unreliable.

there is not a chance in hell that 1.5 million people would voluntarily build a robot army for a tyrant

There are so many ways that a tyrant could end up with a robot army. Don't let's pretend that that's the only way. Here are a few:

1. A country is in turmoil and a leader comes along who makes people feel hope. The people are open to "lesser evil" propositions and risk-taking because they are desperate. They make irrational decisions and empower the wrong person. Hitler is a real life actual example of this happening.

2. A leader who is thought of as "good" builds a killer robot army. Then, realizing that they have total power over their people corrupts them and they behave like a tyrant, effectively turning into an oppressive dictator.

3. Hypothetical scenario: The setting is a country with presidential elections (I choose America for this one). Hypothetically, in this scenario we'll say the technology to do this was completely ready to be exploited. So the government begins to build a killer robot army. Hypothetically, a good president happens to be in office, so people think it's okay. We'll say that president gets a second term. Eight years pass, and a significant killer robot army is created. It's powerful enough to kill every American. Now, it's time to change the president. Maybe the American people choose somebody with their best interests in mind. Maybe they choose a wolf in sheep's clothing, or a moron who doesn't understand the dangers. It's not like we haven't elected morons before and it isn't as if entire countries full of people have never empowered anyone dangerous. I think it's reasonable to say that there's at least a 5% chance that each election will yield either a fatally moronic person, an otherwise good person who is susceptible to being seriously corrupted if given too much power, someone with a tyrant's values/personality, or a sociopath. If you're thinking to yourself "how many times in American history have we seen a president go corrupt by power" consider that there have been checks and balances in place to prevent them from having enough power to be corrupted by. In my opinion, it's likely that most of them would be corrupted by the kind of absolute power that a killer robot army would give them, and 5% is actually quite a low estimate compared with my model of how reality works. But for hypothetical purposes, we'll pretend it's only as high as 5%. We roll the dice on that 5% chance every four years because we hold elections again. If we added those 5% chances up over the course of the rest of my life, we'd end up with it being more likely than not (62.5%) that the wrong person will end up having total control over the country I live in.

Do you see now how a tyrant or other undesirable leader could very conceivably end up heading a killer robot army?

[1]: 1/200 US population average microsoft salary = 150 billion USD. This would require many, many years of work- given how long the military has worked on predators, probably decades. So it would require trillions of dollars.

Thank you. I am very glad for these figures. How long do you think it would take for the US government to build 100 million killer robots?

Also, I don't think you understand sociopathy. The 1/20 figure you cited should be 1/25, which refers to the DSM's "antisocial personality disorder;"

Not sure why we have different numbers but: The statistics for America are different from the statistics for other countries (so, depending on whether your source is aiming for a global figure or local figure, this can vary), the statistic probably changes over time, the DSM changes over time, there are multiple sources on this that probably do not agree, and the 1/20 figure is based on research I did ten years ago, so something in there probably explains it. A 1% difference in prevalence is irrelevant here since (in my extremely amateurish, shoot-from-the-hip estimate "just to get some perspective") if 1 in 200 people are willing to work on the robot army, that's enough -- and 1/25 is obviously significantly larger.

sociopathy is a deficit in moral reasoning, which is very different from being a person who's just waiting to become a minion to some dictator.

Ah, but if you want to be a tyrant you don't need minions who have been dreaming of becoming a minion. Consider this - most people who are employed at a job didn't dream of becoming what they are. There are a lot of people working as cashiers, grocery baggers, doing boring work in a factory, working in telemarketing, etc who dislike and even despise their jobs. Why do they do them? Money, obviously.

Why don't those people turn into drug dealers? They'd make more money that way.

Ethics!

Those people have a sense of right and wrong, or at least are successfully coerced by laws.

People with antisocial personality disorder, the way the DSM defines it, have neither of these properties.

You said yourself above that most people wouldn't want to build a robot army for a tyrant. I agree. But a sociopath doesn't give a rat's behind how they get their money. That is why they are more likely to work for a tyrant - they don't have a conscience and they don't care about the law. If they can make more money assembling killer robots than flipping burgers, there's nothing to stop them from taking the killer robot job.

Taking this into consideration, do you think sociopaths could end up building killer robots?

I agree that it's possible that in this scenario everyone will die but I am not sure why you seem to think it is the most likely outcome.

We are considering a scenario where technology has been developed and disseminated sufficiently to allow Joe Citizen to produce autonomous killer robots with his home based general purpose automated manufacturing device. People more intelligent, educated, resourceful and motivated than Joe Citizen are going to be producing things even more dangerous. And produce things that produce things that... I just assume that kind of environment is not stable.

Is this like a one-woman topic, complete with discussion? A finished product?

Or perhaps it is merely a different way of formatting a discussion post, with the evident intention of making it easier to organise replies. As an experimental posting style this solution has, shall we say, pros and cons.

No. It just looks that way because I just started it. Please contribute your thoughts.

Now I'm not sure whether you were (originally) trying to start a discussion about how the term "lethal autonomy" should be used, or if you intended to imply something to the effect of "lethal autonomy isn't a new threat, therefore we shouldn't be concerned about it".

Even if I was wrong in my interpretation of your message, I'm still glad I responded the way I did - this is one of those topic where it's best if nobody finds excuses to go into denial, default to optimism bias, or otherwise fail to see the risk.

Do you view lethally autonomous robots as a potential threat to freedom and democracy?

Should we say that anthrax bacteria lack the kind of autonomy that we imagine war-fighting robots would have?

Yes. But I wouldn't expect it to come up too often as a sincere question.