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Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance

(www.washingtonpost.com)
617 points jbegley | 3 comments | 04 Feb 25 20:28 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tmnvdb ◴[04 Feb 25 23:14 UTC] No.42940589[source]▶
Good, this idea that all weapons are evil is an insane luxury belief.
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darth_avocado ◴[04 Feb 25 23:41 UTC] No.42940977[source]▶
Weapons inherently aren’t evil, which is why everyone has kitchen knives. People use weapons to do evil.

The problem with building AI weapons is that eventually it will be in the hands of people who are morally bankrupt and therefore will use them to do evil.

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1. osmsucks ◴[05 Feb 25 00:44 UTC] No.42941732[source]▶
The difference there is that a knife has some obvious, benign use cases. Smart weapons targeting has only one use case, and it's to do harm to others.
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2. xdennis ◴[05 Feb 25 01:09 UTC] No.42942004[source]▶
AI weapons do have benign use cases: harming enemies.

When China attacks with AI weapons do you expect the free world to fight back armed with moral superiority? No. We need even more lethal AI weapons.

Mutual assured destruction has worked so far for nukes.

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3. osmsucks ◴[05 Feb 25 07:27 UTC] No.42945114[source]▶
Use of weapons is only benign to you if you're not on the receiving end. Imagine your family being blown up by a rocket because an AI system hallucinated that they're part of a dangerous terror cell.

My point though is that this is the only use case for such systems. The common comparisons to things like knives are invalid for this reason.