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Comment by smsm42

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Comment by smsm42

> Because if the AI chose incorrectly, the military would be attacking targets that it shouldn't.

Regrettably, this already is happening today, and have been happening since there was a military. All the time. Intel is imperfect, situation changes quickly, people make mistakes, shit happens. The army is not interested in increasing the number of such occurrences - because the army is not incentivized on destroying targets it wasn't asked to destroy. But it still happens. It happened without AI and it will happen with AI. Putting mandatory human in the loop may be a ideological and philosophical choice, but I don't see any argument here it will always reduce such occurrences. In fact, if anything, it might increase them - humans are known for hundreds of cognitive biases.

> The question is about the US government using its influence in a competitive environment to hamstring one company.

No company is owed contract from the US government. Of course, companies that get a lot of contracts from US government, may profit more than ones that do not, but it still don't create any entitlement. US government has its specs, Antropic is unwilling to make a product for those specs, so US government is not buying from Antropic. Presenting not-buying decision as a hostile action implies there's an entitlement to be a supplier, and such entitlement does not exist.

> Since then, it has come out that AI was used in the decision to target an elementary school for girls that killed 120 schoolchildren.

We are getting into the territory of "70% of traffic crashes are blamed on sober drivers, therefore driving sober is a crime". OF COURSE once AI starts to be used, somebody will eventually make a bad call, somebody gets fed bad intel, something changes and somebody does not notice, and AI would be used in a chain that led to a disaster. AI is not God and is not Oracle of Truth, it's a tool. Every tool is imperfect and depends on its inputs and it's usage. Every tool has boundaries of usability and error margins. You can not change it coming with your post-hoc knowledge and pontificating that if some mythical all knowing human happened to be in the chain at the precisely correct moment he'd prevent the tragedy. Such human never exists at-the-time, only post-hoc, when all the social media is full of them, and there's no AI that allows you to read tomorrow's Twitter, and never will be. Claiming that DOD should not ever use tool X in a scenario that could lead to a disaster is claiming to never use tool X at all - because every practical scenario with practical assumptions can. And ultimately, it's a call for DOD to never exists as a military. Which I guess would be fine with some folks, but I think you'd not expect DOD to agree with that.

> My supposedly very vivid imagination translated this to reckless decisionmaking that led to a large number of innocent civilian casualties, aka war crimes.

As I said, extensively, the reality of warmaking will inevitably lead to innocent civilian casualties. There never was, and never will be, a war (at least real, hot, shooting war) where innocents would not be suffering. It's not the intention of DOD, it's the reality of how things happen. Now we learn your definition of "war crimes" includes, essentially, any warmaking of sufficient scale in time and space that will inevitably cause innocent casualties, and with sufficient scale, they could be claimed as "large". In other words, every (big enough) war is a crime. It is a possible position, even if a bit too idealistic and high-horse-y to my taste. But I think now at least you can appreciate why it would be very imprudent for DOD to subject themselves to people who would limit their capabilities based on such sort of definitions?

Replies smsm42 · 28d
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