Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems are on the way

Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)

Chinatopix reports that a new missile with on-board Artificial Intelligence will be deployed by both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force by 2018. The AI will be able to pick out the correct ship to target with a fleet. In addition, the article states that multiple LRASMs can share information, and attack as a swarm.

While not completely autonomous, this nevertheless represents a serious step towards ceding control of ordinance to a machine. Given the current poor understanding of how a lot of machine-learning actually works, this is a dangerous step.

Recently, the United Nations debated such Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), with many countries pushing for an outright ban. With AI-based missiles in development, the UN and the international community will have to speed up their deliberations in order to prevent such weapons ever being deployed.

Source: LRASM, First US Missile with Artificial Intelligence, to be Deployed by 2018 : Science : Chinatopix

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