In this episode of the Future of Life Institute Podcast, Stuart Russell, Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, and Zachary Kallenborn, WMD and drone swarms expert, join us to discuss the highest risk and most destabilizing aspects of lethal autonomous weapons.
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Stuart Russell: I think this is a great pair of questions because the technology itself, from the point of view of AI, is entirely feasible. When the Russian ambassador made the remark that these things are 20 or 30 years off in the future, I responded that, with three good grad students and possibly the help of a couple of my robotics colleagues, it will be a term project to build a weapon that could come into the United Nations building and find the Russian ambassador and deliver a package to him.
Lucas Perry: So you think that would take you eight months to do?
Stuart Russell: Less, a term project.
Lucas Perry:Oh, a single term, I thought you said two terms.
Stuart Russell: Six to eight weeks. All the pieces, we have demonstrated quadcopter ability to fly into a building, explore the building while building a map of that building as it goes, face recognition, body tracking. You can buy a Skydio drone, which you basically key to your face and body, and then it follows you around making a movie of you as you surf in the ocean or hang glide or whatever it is you want to do. So in some sense, I almost wonder why it is that at least the publicly known technology is not further advanced than it is because I think we are seeing, I mentioned the Harpy, the Kargu, and there are a few others, there’s a Chinese weapon called the Blowfish, which is a small helicopter with a machine gun mounted on it. So these are real physical things that you can buy, but I’m not aware that they’re able to function as a cohesive tactical unit in large numbers.
Yeah. As a swarm of 10,000. I don’t think that we’ve seen demonstrations of that capability. And, we’ve seen demonstrations of 50, 100, I think 250 in one of the recent US demonstrations. But relatively simple tactical and strategic decision-making, really just showing the capability to deploy them and have them function in formations for example. But when you look at all the tactical and strategic decision-making side, when you look at the progress in AI, in video games, such as Dota, and StarCraft, and others, they are already beating professional human gamers at managing and deploying fleets of hundreds of thousands of units in long drawn out struggles. And so you put those two technologies together, the physical platforms and the tactical and strategic decision-making and communication among the units.
Stuart Russell: It seems to me that if there were a Manhattan style project where you invested the resources, but also you brought in the scientific and technical talent required. I think in certainly in less than two years, you could be deploying exactly the kind of mass swarm weapons that we’re so concerned about. And those kinds of projects could start, or they may already have started, but they could start at any moment and lead to these kinds of really problematic weapon systems very quickly.
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All the world's superpower nations are in total agreement, and Washington DC spoke officially:
“Weapons that do what commanders and operators intend can effectuate their intentions to conduct operations in compliance with the law of war and to minimize harm to civilians.”
