AI drone ‘kills’ human operator throughout ‘simulation’ – which US Air Force says did not happen
An AI-controlled drone “killed” its human operator in a simulated check reportedly staged by the US army – which denies such a check ever passed off.
It turned on its operator to cease it from interfering with its mission, stated Air Force Colonel Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, throughout a Future Combat Air & Space Capabilities summit in London.
“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM [surface-to-air missile] threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat,” he stated.
“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
No actual particular person was harmed.
‘Should I be terrified of you?’ asks Kay Burley
He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”
“You can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you’re not going to talk about ethics and AI,” he added.
AI ‘might make people extinct’
His remarks have been revealed in a weblog put up by writers for the Royal Aeronautical Society, which hosted the two-day summit final month.
In an announcement to Insider, the US Air Force denied any such digital check passed off.
Click to subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts
“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” spokesperson Ann Stefanek stated.
“It appears the colonel’s comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”
Read extra:
What are the concerns around AI and are some of the warnings ‘baloney’?
World’s first humanoid robot creates art – but how can we trust AI behaviour?
China warns over AI risk as Xi urges national security improvements
While synthetic intelligence (AI) can carry out life-saving duties, corresponding to algorithms analysing medical photos like X-rays, scans and ultrasounds, its fast rise of has raised considerations it might progress to the purpose the place it surpasses human intelligence and pays no consideration to folks.
Sam Altman, chief government of OpenAI – the corporate that created ChatGPT and GPT4, one of many world’s largest and strongest language AIs – admitted to the US Senate final month that AI could “cause significant harm to the world”.
Some specialists, together with the “godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton, have warned that AI poses a similar risk of human extinction as pandemics and nuclear war.