Autonomous drones following running people through the woods, without GPS.
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Social impact statement: This technology allows population-level massacre at a cost of a hundred dollars per person. Produced at scale it could cause more suffering and death per dollar than nuclear weapons.
However, there are also positive uses: it could be used to help runners improve their form.
@pbloem Importantly: it allows this massacre to happen with the killers out of reach of the target...
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@qevlarr I agree with the general idea. But just adding some arbitrary ethics course to the curriculum is not enough at this point. I think we need to discuss concrete social impact inside of the technical courses, right next to every technology.
The normal humanities curriculum can be a bit vague and non-commital for the average techie. In my lectures I've tried to always give very direct, concrete examples of exactly how technological developments have killed or hurt people (I'm not always the most fun lecturer).
@pbloem @qevlarr Not always the most fun? How the hell would describing the social impacts by looking at the mechanics of what a technology does in a society using real world examples not be fun?!
... ah, right, the devistating fealing that anything you try to do to improve the world makes it worse. Temporarily forgot about that one.
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Social impact statement: This technology allows population-level massacre at a cost of a hundred dollars per person. Produced at scale it could cause more suffering and death per dollar than nuclear weapons.
However, there are also positive uses: it could be used to help runners improve their form.
@pbloem I've seen similar devices marketed to runners and cyclists, and for such purposes it does seem pretty cool. Of course, I can easily see how it could be used with less pleasant intentions too.
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Autonomous drones following running people through the woods, without GPS. Developed, with military funds, at a public university.
This is not dual use anymore, this is single use. There is only one use here.
Sometimes I worry that I'm becoming a negative Nancy with all my ethics talk, and then I see colleagues proudly post this kind of thing without a single acknowledgment of the implications.
@pbloem That whole slab of text they posted is just AI-generated, I'm sure.
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@mlanger Killing people who are running away from the drone.
If you want to film people you don't need to worry so much about autonomy, or chasing a target that is actively running away, or about doing it without GPS. All the design parameters here scream war.
To be fair: I was slightly hyperbolic. You _could_ use this to film somebody doing a trail run. But in this case, that's not the obvious application.
@pbloem @mlanger The Bioneer (a fitness influencer with a YouTube channel) has a lot of footage of himself running on trails, such as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9-thkwnmkA
It's clear that there's something that gets the drone to follow and keep him in frame, and he seems to do an awful lot of the filming himself.
Maybe the drone shots are controlled by another person, but it sure looks like it follows him some other way.
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Social impact statement: This technology allows population-level massacre at a cost of a hundred dollars per person. Produced at scale it could cause more suffering and death per dollar than nuclear weapons.
However, there are also positive uses: it could be used to help runners improve their form.
@pbloem and while armed properly it will convince runners to go faster and farther ...
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@lana @knowprose @pbloem my thought exactly. I have worked in labs like this. They know what they are doing, though they probably state it as "this will save the lives of American soldiers" and conveniently elide the part where it's murdering other people to do so and also assuming the American military and/or whoever else gets their hands on it will use it for "good".
But yeah they are not naive, they know they are developing a weapons system.
@darius @lana @knowprose @pbloem my son makes jokes that in engineering school they are learning to build weapons or targets.
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@pbloem @mlanger The Bioneer (a fitness influencer with a YouTube channel) has a lot of footage of himself running on trails, such as here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9-thkwnmkA
It's clear that there's something that gets the drone to follow and keep him in frame, and he seems to do an awful lot of the filming himself.
Maybe the drone shots are controlled by another person, but it sure looks like it follows him some other way.
@philipbrewer @pbloem Mine will follow me from any angle. It can take hand signals for instruction. It's really cool. I don't think it uses GPS. I think it locks onto me visually and then just follows from the point of view I indicate. I call it a selfie drone. #DJINeo2
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@mlanger Killing people who are running away from the drone.
If you want to film people you don't need to worry so much about autonomy, or chasing a target that is actively running away, or about doing it without GPS. All the design parameters here scream war.
To be fair: I was slightly hyperbolic. You _could_ use this to film somebody doing a trail run. But in this case, that's not the obvious application.
@pbloem Well, it is the obvious application for my drone, which also does not have guns. Do the drones you're talking about have gun guns?
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@philipbrewer @pbloem Mine will follow me from any angle. It can take hand signals for instruction. It's really cool. I don't think it uses GPS. I think it locks onto me visually and then just follows from the point of view I indicate. I call it a selfie drone. #DJINeo2
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@darius @lana @knowprose @pbloem my son makes jokes that in engineering school they are learning to build weapons or targets.
@ATLeagle @darius @lana @pbloem yup. If they wanted bridges, if people voted for bridges, we would have really cool bridges.
That's not what people vote for. They vote for safety, usually at the expense of everyone's.
Richard Feynman, "The Meaning Of It All: Thoughts of a citizen scientist" is a book i highly recommend. He had to deal with involvement in making The Bomb.
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Autonomous drones following running people through the woods, without GPS. Developed, with military funds, at a public university.
This is not dual use anymore, this is single use. There is only one use here.
Sometimes I worry that I'm becoming a negative Nancy with all my ethics talk, and then I see colleagues proudly post this kind of thing without a single acknowledgment of the implications.
@pbloem i recognize the forest from the photo omg
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@pbloem i recognize the forest from the photo omg
@pbloem west lafayette, indiana. about a half mile north of the intersection of mccormick and stadium, on the east side of the road
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@pbloem west lafayette, indiana. about a half mile north of the intersection of mccormick and stadium, on the east side of the road
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@pbloem I'm not understanding what the "single use" is. I have a DJI Neo 2 drone that can do this and its primary purpose is to shoot video. I don't find that something to be worried about so I suspect I'm missing something in your post
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@pbloem >This work involves many open-source software tools,
and I believe we should imply a new free software license clause: no military, no surveillance. because free software cannot trace and murder people..as a programmer I never worked for anything like that and I don't want any line of code I ever wrote was ever used for such dishonorary purposes. -
@lana @pbloem I did not pretend anything, but I suspect you are talking about them. Why would THEY do it?
Simple. Three possibilities.
(1) Target blindness. It *is* an interesting problem to solve. So without a thought, maybe they did.
(2) they are actually trying to do what we see can be done, possibly to save lives on whatever side they claim to be.
(3) that's exactly the problem they are trying to solve.
I've seen all 3.
@knowprose Creating a machine for chasing people makes it almost certain that the designer's goals are malicious. There are very few positive roles for a chasing machine, but countless hostile roles.
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@knowprose Creating a machine for chasing people makes it almost certain that the designer's goals are malicious. There are very few positive roles for a chasing machine, but countless hostile roles.
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No, @knowprose. I am NOT being creative. This is about the nature of the technology.
A chasing device is most useful to people with hostile intent.
Just as a device for delivering bombs to remote targets is most useful to people with hostile intent.
And a device for propelling a small metal projectile at high speed with high accuracy is most useful to people with hostile intent.
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@mlanger Ah! I understand the confusion now. Sorry, I misunderstood you before. (Thanks @bluetea.)
"Dual use" is a phrase researchers use when thinking about ethics and security in technology. For example, an AI system for designing novel drugs may sound great, but it might also be used to develop neurotoxin, so that could be a dual use technology. Serious dual use technology can have, for example, export restrictions.
Anyway, AI researchers have a habit of posting "cool demos" while showing an absolute blind spot for worrying dual use. For example, automated lip reading. They then get criticised on social media.
I called this drone demo "single use" because they're not even pretending anymore that there is any beneficial application. This is very clearly designed for hunting people.
I didn't mean to imply that the drones themselves are necessarily single use, although that is actually a very likely (and very worrying) way of using this kind of technology to kill. The short film "Slaughterbots" showed this pretty vividly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterbots
