Autonomous Weapons

[Music] this week what will it take to keep us all safe will machines lead us into war how do we stop killer robots from becoming a reality i was in hunter and can the victims speak louder than the survivors [Music] has there ever been a time when we haven't been at war battles have been raging down through the ages over land they have a religion over resources and every so often a new technology comes along which gives one side a massive advantage and changes the shape of war forever throughout the history of warfare there has been one common thread and that is that it's been people who've made the decisions on who and how to fight but now we're having to ask the question what would happen if you took the human out of the loop weapons guided and driven by artificial intelligence are no longer science fiction and next week the um will discuss whether the development and deployment of this kind of tech should be left unrestricted should be regulated or outright banned so far the u.s and the uk have opposed binding agreements to regulate or ban the use of so-called killer robots james clayton reports from silicon valley on the dawning reality that ai researchers say we need to start thinking about today the nuclear bomb totally transformed warfare there are those that now say that we're on the cusp of something similar is a fast track to i think dystopia is the right word for it the nation is still recovering from yesterday's incident which officials are describing as some kind of automated attack which killed 11 u.s senators at the capitol building autonomous weapons combine a confluence of different technologies drones facial recognition artificial intelligence and big data to create a sort of super weapon that not only detects and destroys but can make that decision itself and can be owned not just by states but potentially by organizations terrorist groups anyone this is the kind of dystopian reality that is being painted by critics assassinations private armies of bots computers deciding whether humans live or die these types of weapons that could easily be deployed and move throughout different environments like a swarm the sort of embodiments of the robo dog with the machine gun and how easy those can proliferate how easy those can fall into the hands of not what we think of as traditional militaries this isn't about prohibiting or banning ai uses in the military or even in weapon systems it's about drawing a red line on the specific use case of weapons which are these smaller types of systems that target people even the un secretary general is worried the weaponization of artificial intelligence is a serious danger on the 13th of december a review of conventional weapons is scheduled to be held at the un in geneva where they'll be discussing killer robots campaigners will be looking for an outright ban but already that looks unlikely with the u.s reportedly saying it would prefer a non-binding agreement the discussion should be more about how we regulate it and how we how we kind of try and define it and approach it rather than trying to outright ban it which isn't going to happen russia china and the u.s are going to go after these technologies so they're very keen to avoid um being put at a competitive disadvantage uh against what is increasingly looking like the sort of great power cold war type competition over the next 30 to 50 years but if countries can't ban killer robots what will that mean for humanity is a fast track to i think dystopia is the right word for it it's it's a world in which we've delegated and relegated the decision to take a human life to algorithms right but it's not quite as simple as that others argue that autonomous weapons are often mischaracterized it's not being given the the authority to kind of decide its mission set no commander in the world would ever want a weapon system that decided what it wanted to do on a given moment these are these will be pre-programmed rules according to pre-programmed rules of engagement that are legally screened to make sure they meet the the requirements of the law of armed conflict the machine may make cleaner decisions on the rules of engagement which have been preset and pre-assigned on legal grounds than a stressed pilot who's trying to do a million different things at once that may be the case with a sophisticated military but that's not necessarily what we're talking about here if anyone has a ability to access a type of weapon that can selectively target a group of people just lay that framing onto all of the types of conflict that we see today whether we think about conflicts within country when we think about rogue states when we think about terrorist groups when we think about cartels when we think about violent crime and now you're giving powering those types of conflicts with a weapon that can target its scale right and to me that is a very very scary future autonomous weapons aren't a distant possibility much of the tech needed to create them already exists and some believe that if humans can't get together to ban them it could be one of humanity's greatest mistakes that was james clayton and i've been speaking to professor stuart russell whose bbc wreath lecture this week warned about the dangers of a.i controlled weaponry the letter raised the possibility of children playing with toy guns being accidentally targeted by the killer robots he was involved in the original slaughterbots short film from 2017 which in itself was shockingly realistic [Music] did you see that before it was premiered publicly i showed it to some my ai colleagues right when they're watching the ceo of the arms company demonstrating the capabilities of this new technology and the kinds of uses that you could put it to um they thought this was a documentary they did they didn't think this was fictional at all your kids probably have one of these right you know when when it premiered in geneva actually at the the negotiations on on autonomous weapons the russian ambassador sort of sneered at this and said well why are we even discussing this this is science fiction it won't be possible for even 25 or 30 years three weeks after we premiered the movie a turkish arms company stm actually announced a weapon and they advertised capabilities for autonomous hits on humans you know face recognition human tracking all the things that the ceo talks about those genuine bots could exhibit the same kind of intelligence and autonomy that's that's in the film i would imagine they'd be manually controlled and flown into things uh you might think that but actually no they are fully autonomous and the un um has a report uh showing that they were actually used autonomously to uh to hunt down and retreating troops in libya uh in march of 2020. i think there are a lot of different arguments people make one one is a moral argument that is just morally unacceptable to turn over to a machine the decision to kill a human being you can basically launch weapons by the million enough to kill half a city the bad half type in rough description of the mission like you know wipe out everyone in this city of between the age of 12 and 60. just characterize him release the swarm and rest easy so you create this weapon of mass destruction that's more effective than nuclear weapons cheaper easier to build easier to proliferate and doesn't leave behind a huge radioactive smoking crater is the answer just always to keep a human in the loop and is the problem with that which human i i think the answer is yes to disallow attacks where there's no human uh supervision there's no human who is looking at the actual situation and the actual target and saying yes this is okay you know even under the assumption that the machine is programmed by someone who has the best legal training and you know the most humanitarian of aims even in that situation we face problems of not being able to make the decisions correctly the problem is the idea of these slaughter bots all the bits could be brought in a decent supermarket probably with the exception of the small bit of explosives so what do we do they're they're technically already available and how would you ever ban well so we we ban many things that are already available so biological weapons it wouldn't be that hard for someone with the knowledge to to create a biologic weapon but we still ban them chemical weapons are widely available industrial products the companies that make them are required to account for those products to uh to check that their customers are real customers and not fake shell companies um companies that receive an order for five million quadcopters would need to check who who's buying the five million quadcopters we can do this uh in ways that will not be perfect but will prevent the kinds of weapons of mass destruction that i'm most concerned about [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week better.com ceo had a better day than the 900 people he fired over zoom your employment here is terminated twitter closed thousands of fake china state-linked accounts pushing propaganda and here's a look at nasa's latest crop of artemis astronauts some of whom might take giant steps walking on the moon it was also the week instagram announced a new feature to help manage time spent on the app parents will be able to see and possibly be horrified by how much time their children spend on the app and set time limits while teens will get their scrolling interrupted by take a break reminders it comes after leaked internal research suggested teenagers blamed the app for increased anxiety researchers from mit's sea sale have found a new way to exercise the brains and bodies of soft robots inside a computer programme welcome to the evolution gym a simulator allowing large-scale testing of machine learning algorithms who choose how to grow bodies to complete tasks like climbing and flipping some are evolving like animals and finally those of us who've always wanted to swap hands for wheels are in for a treat that's what researchers at eth zurich did with this the newest iteration of any mole its quadruple-legs robot it simply locks its wheels when it needs to walk but why walk when with a top speed of 40 miles an hour it can even roll up and down staircases that's a really good idea the pandemics come with many a challenge but at least for the majority of us being at home actually means being in a place of safety but not for everyone calls and messages to domestic abuse charity refuge increased by over 60 percent between april last year and february this year some have described the situation as an epidemic beneath a pandemic and this isn't an issue in the uk alone in israel domestic violence cases between partners quadrupled last year i was in 2019 i was murdered by the man who was my husband this was from a campaign highlighting the issue by giving a voice to those who never got the chance to speak up for themselves so we've been training our uh deep learning tools for quite a long time on really you know hundreds of thousands of faces and a video so it really understands really really well how faces move and it's able when you give it a video of someone moving their face to transfer all that movement to a still image it understands where the different markers on the face are and what will look realistic and it you know it's very very skillful at taking you know every little gesture every little blink uh and and adding it to that new image we were able to take uh videos of famous actresses uh speaking and bringing their story to life and allowing our technology allowed it to transfer that to their actual image so it appeared as though they were telling their own story the shocking murder of mikhail sailor shook israel in 2019 her husband was found guilty of stabbing her to death in front of her young daughter and her case is not an isolated one i spoke to her sister who's become a leading voice in raising awareness for domestic abuse in israel setting up a charity hoping to use technology to save the next murder victim after it happened i had so many questions how come it happened to us how come i didn't see anything why didn't she share nothing with me what was she going through the biggest question could have we saved michal could michael be with us today and you've actually taken your grief to start a charity and help raise awareness haven't you the head of this campaign is chiran meladowski sommer and first time i heard her idea to take my sister picture and made her alive i was shocked i was like oh my god it's too hard but then i thought again and i told her you know what shiran you're a genius this is what the world needs the world needs to be shocked what do you hope to achieve overall my vision is there zero femicide per year an ecosystem of hundreds and thousands of startups to save lives of women in their own home so we can beat this we can combat domestic violence with technology with an innovation the human kind we solve much harder problems than this now many of us may feel quite uncomfortable when we have to unavoidably walk home alone especially in the dark so shona mccallum's been taking a look at some of the latest technology that's hoping to help keep us safe there's always that thought at the back of your mind will i get home safe tonight between leaving your friends and opening your front door there might be a time you're traveling alone we might call our mum share our location on whatsapp or have our keys to hand anything to make us feel safer but i'm interested to find out is there something better one in three women in the world experience violence at some point in their lives and even more say they've been harassed or felt unsafe we did experience being followed we had cat calling and we didn't receive quite a lot of unwanted attention we did see flashes quite frequently on our school run experiences like that led emma k to create walk safe an app to help women map out a safer route home so we've got our walk safe map you and i we're on our way home what i can do is i can have a look at our routes i can zone out here and as you can see it will show me all where the recent crime data is so that's been a recent pickpocketing and this has been where an assault has taken place looks like somewhere we'd want to avoid right exactly the app also has a feature called tap safe where you tap the phone to alert your friends or family that you feel under threat but some might feel having this kind of information in your pocket could make you more paranoid looking around this park it's lovely and yeah i feel pretty safe but just a couple of hours later and in the dark things feel pretty different and if you were getting assaulted it's perhaps unlikely that you'd reach for your phone and bring up a safety app so i've traveled to the university of bath to meet the team who are developing a smartwatch app that senses distress by monitoring heart rate and body motion to send an automatic alert if you're under attack [Music] i mean i often feel scared when i'm out walking or running alone so when i saw that apple watches were being used to detect heart attacks i had a kind of light bulb moment and i thought oh okay well maybe these could be applied to women's safety but as the team have discovered it's difficult to simulate distress we looked at loads and loads of police reports and loads of cctv footage of people being attacked and we tried to find things that were common amongst everything and we saw you know the struggling motion the pushing motion that kind of changed from something being very regular and repetitive to something that was very erratic jump lunges 98-67 so they created a test which allowed them to collect the data to train an algorithm which could recognize similar events 26 plus this smartwatch tech is an early development but if the team managed to crack it it could be something we see being used by women in the future the be safe app for smartphones is similar too all guardians alerted the idea is that an emergency alarm is activated by your voice and then it automatically starts live streaming video and audio to your chosen contacts and records what's happening the company believes these recordings could be used in evidence in court cases which are often hard to prove making women safer on our street should be a priority for all of society and what's clear is this huge problem can't be solved by technology alone but what i've discovered is that tech could have a role to play in addressing some of the fears that women feel on their journey's home for years efforts in developing autonomous systems have focused on replicating the human brain through machine learning but one uk based startup thinks that there may be a better model the honeybee engineers at opturan think nature has already solved autonomy and they've been researching the brains of honeybees to derive algorithms to teach robots and drones collision avoidance honeybee is a fabulous visual navigator they can understand the world they're in over 10 kilometer radius they can fly point to point and return to home and they can share information with other bees in the hive and then those bees can go to that location that's exactly what robots need to do we have robots in warehouses that need to move around and get to certain locations and then come back and then do that dynamically without bumping into other things or if the environment changes we have the same with in the air with drones doing inspections self-balancing autonomous bicycles and navigating around the streets essentially what's happening is machines need to move more naturally the system enables drones and robots to take panoramic views of the world around them just like an insect would then like a honey bee the sensing technology calculates the optic flow across the field of vision considering any obstacles and taking action to avoid collisions the system has already been tested on drones and a robot dog named hopper nature likes to solve things in the most simple way possible it finds those solutions that stop you having to do a lot of computation that you didn't have to do and one of the ways it does that is in how it perceives the world so every animal that we know that uses vision to navigate works out the motion of the world around us we call it optical flow and that's exactly how our technology works and the company claims that basing algorithms on insect brains could be a more efficient way of creating ai importantly it would also be a more affordable method for lower cost robotic applications and that's the market that optoran is targeting current approach to ai is fundamentally flawed because it's really based on a caricature of how real brains work it's kind of a tiny piece of the puzzle that's just been scaled up and applied to lots and lots of data with lots and lots of compute power but that means it's very fragile doesn't work the way real brains work and it's very opaque we don't really understand what it's doing half the time and that's just not a good enough solution for autonomous systems nature has come up with weird and wonderful ways of doing things that humans could never figure out so maybe there's a lot more technologists can learn from the other creatures around us [Music] that's it from us for this week as ever you can keep up with the team on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbc click thanks for watching and we'll see you soon bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

Views: 118,436

Keywords: BBC, BBC Click, BBC News, Click, Technology, Tech, click;, weapons, war, fight, ai, artificial intelligence, robot

Id: xo4kFivp1i0

Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021