AI warfare is already here

The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, an international forum that focuses on lethal autonomous systems, is hosted twice a year at the United Nations in Geneva. When Branka Marijan attended in November 2017, she thought the five-day sessions — which dealt largely in hypotheticals, speculating on a world where warfare was fought with killer robots — would be business as usual. After all, this was technology some thought might never be developed, and likely never deployed. That year, she quickly realized, was different. That distant, imagined future was suddenly closer and realer than ever. On the first day, some attendees watched a short film called Slaughterbots , put together by the Future of Life Institute. The video featured a fictional defense contractor pitching an AI-powered drone that could kill unassisted with precision strikes. “They used to say guns don’t kill people, people do,” its CEO tells the audience. “But people don’t. They get emotional, disobey orders, aim high. Let’s watch the weapons make the decisions.” The mood in the room, Marijan recalls, suddenly turned apprehensive. The most frightening part wasn’t the premise — it was that the Pentagon was already developing a version of this technology. That meeting was the first one held after the start of Project Maven, a US Department of Defense initiative using AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. And by late 2017, Maven had a major tech company on board: Google. …