As someone who is filled with unholy terror every time Alexa or Siri speaks and wants to run screaming for the hills, where my fully stocked bunker awaits, every time I see kids playing with toy drones instead of kites in the park, Netflix Stranger: Killer Robots is... a challenging watch.
"It's a cliché, but I 100% believe 'freedom is not free,'" says Brandon Tseng, former US Navy Seal and co-founder of Shield AI. His company now joins the battle for military supremacy through artificial intelligence. The race is on across the US and no doubt in Russia and China as well to develop autonomous drones and other technologies that could allow soldiers to avoid such dangerous jobs as clearing buildings of armed personnel, explosive devices, etc. , or that can track subjects in inhospitable terrain. and vast areas, oh, and kill people when the need arises.
Director: Jesse Sweet
Stars: Nick Bilton, Max Tegmark, Andrew Yang
The enemy, obviously. Which will be able to reliably identify, always acting within the rules of engagement. I mean, there may be rough spots along the way. Paul Scharre, former US Army Ranger and author of Army of None, recalls the unspoken agreement between his men not to shoot when insurgents sent an eight-year-old girl ahead of them to look for danger. A bot would have seen her as a legitimate and legal target, but I'm sure these issues will be resolved in time. (Does anyone know how the racist chatbot that made headlines last year is faring, by the way?)
Except, of course, how can they be? Unknown: Killer Robots walks us through various inventions (including those headless robot dogs you see too much on social media), settings, and branching with admirable certainty. You feel like his heart is in the cool kids who do all the cool stuff. And it's hard not to be mesmerized by the extraordinary things to come. Watch MIT's latest dog quickly navigate new surfaces through the infinite raw power of machine learning, or watch a flight lieutenant with 20 years of combat under his immaculately polished belt get bested in a dogfight over a new piece of technology that has been filled with 30 years. of experience in 10 months, is to see a terrible beauty born. But every time the movie slips into cheerleading (and jingoistic) mode, it reminds itself and us of duty and turns to showing the less telegenic side of things.
I mean stories like those of Sean Ekins and Fabio Urbina. They "just switched from 0 to 1" in their work finding treatments and cures through AI molecules and models for under-researched diseases, "pushed it up" and returned to their desks later to discover that their six-year-old Apple Mac had created 40,000 new molecules that would be absolutely lethal to humanity. Only if a bad actor gets hold of them, but… well, Ekins has hardly slept since. “We were totally naive…Anyone could do what we did. How do we control this technology before it is used to do something totally destructive?
The dilemma that surrounds almost all military inventions (perhaps almost all inventions, full stop) is what is somewhat pompously called "the dual-use problem." On the one hand, you have drones and robots that can clear buildings without risking the lives of soldiers. On the other hand, you can arm them, empower them, and use them to wipe out entire towns without anyone getting their hands dirty.
What is that sense of detachment at the level of carnage likely to do in a war in general? Former US Defense Secretary Bob Work does not believe that "human intervention in decisions to kill" will ever change. I can't help but pause for a moment to respectfully suggest that the good colonel has never known humanity or that he is the show's equivalent of the flight attendant urging people to keep calm as the airliner goes down. plummeting towards its fierce destiny.
Ultimately, the latest installment of Netflix's Unknown documentary leaves me knowing a lot more about something I feel like I'd be better off not knowing at all. So, good job done I guess. I write to you from a bunker in the hills and I will never get out.
Comments
Post a Comment