60 Minutes stories

Anyone else see 60 Minutes tonight? Second story was scary as hell about the military's use of self-aware drones that can fly by themselves without humans flying by joystick, communicate with each other to hone in on a target, and use facial recognition to identify the enemy and kill him without any human interference. In other words, kill without a person giving the green light. They said within 2 years, these drones will be much faster than they are now, and will have self defense weapons to defend themselves in enemy territory, not just to kill the target, but think enough to defend themselves and each other. For anyone fearful of AI, this is the next step in making the Terminator movies a reality.

The days of Cyberdyne is at hand. The singularity is now!

For me, this was the most frightening story 60 Minutes has aired in a while.

autonomous standoff weapons have been around for a long time... now they simply will be communicating with each other. Swarms of bats. They sort themselves out and take assigned sectors. Facial recognition by machine is better than humans and even several years ago the Mossad sniper team kept getting a go-ahead on the voice identification from the computer but the human was uncertain. Finally the commander said 'rely on the machine' and they hit the detonation trigger. Blew up a terrorist by blowing his jaw completely off his head. The machine was right. So soon there will be no time consuming and unreliable people in the loop. Drones can do 9g turns, human pilots can't. Drones can look like insects, humans can't. Even a large drone now has a smaller radar signature than a lone crow.

Robots already patrol warehouses and base perimeters. Robots already have weaponry. Its just the command and control stuff that has to be worked out. Think of that incident involving three ranger companies deep behind the lines... they lost their comm link and it was only the personal computer of a civilian that re-established communications for them. So when things like that happen... what is the use of relying on someone in the Pentagon or in Nevada. You have to rely on the robot. Time and bandwidth may not be available for a human to make the decision.

Of course you may have not heard about San Diego... a little girl used her parents Alexa to order herself a doll. The newscaster reporting the story caused several Alexa's in San Diego to begin to order dolls. One couple discovered that they have two household Internet of Things devices that are asking each other questions.
Ain't machine warfare gonna be great?

If there is anything left of us after an "automated war" where opposing robotic hardware battles other robotic hardware, then we may still need a sword.

Quote: rxwine

If there is anything left of us after an "automated war" where opposing robotic hardware battles other robotic hardware, then we may still need a sword.

Nareed, you are our Stars War expert... perhaps you can post something about that episode wherein all wars were fought in computers and the mathematically selected casualties had to report to the killing stations.

I can just imagine some soldier saying ''firefight".... and not realizing the robot thought it was a command.

Quote: zippyboy

Anyone else see 60 Minutes tonight? Second story was scary as hell about the military's use of self-aware drones that can fly by themselves without humans flying by joystick, communicate with each other to hone in on a target, and use facial recognition to identify the enemy and kill him without any human interference. In other words, kill without a person giving the green light. They said within 2 years, these drones will be much faster than they are now, and will have self defense weapons to defend themselves in enemy territory, not just to kill the target, but think enough to defend themselves and each other. For anyone fearful of AI, this is the next step in making the Terminator movies a reality.

The days of Cyberdyne is at hand. The singularity is now!

For me, this was the most frightening story 60 Minutes has aired in a while.

At the Vegas CES show
Just introduced a drone camera with facial recognition software that can follow a single person around
Saw it demonstrated on CNN headline news
Pretty neat
Of course what is neat to a consumer can be turned into something much more sinister by defense contractors

Quote: Fleastiff

Nareed, you are our Stars War expert... perhaps you can post something about that episode wherein all wars were fought in computers and the mathematically selected casualties had to report to the killing stations.

I can just imagine some soldier saying ''firefight".... and not realizing the robot thought it was a command.

That was star Trek.

Quote: pew

That was star Trek.

Star Wars, Star Trek ... same thing to me.

By teh way MIT has been having battlling robots for eons.

deleted double post

I watched most of the story about the parents of an American journalist who was captured by ISL in Syria, and later executed... because the U.S. Government doesn't pay ransoms.

I thought this story was scary, because Leslie Stahl put the blame for the execution on the U.S. Government. Not once was it mentioned that the blame is squarely on ISL. It wasn't journalism, it was ISL propaganda.

In the story, it was mentioned that the ransom demands were "the release of all Muslim prisoners in the US" OR... 100 million Euros. It was mentioned that other countries (Spain, Germany, France) pay, and then deny paying after their hostages are released. There' was no exploration of the fact that their payments have allowed ISL to kill many other innocents.

Quote: Ayecarumba

I watched most of the story about the parents of an American journalist who was captured by ISL in Syria, and later executed because the U.S. Government doesn't pay ransoms.

I thought this story was scary, because Leslie Stahl was trying to put the blame for the execution on the U.S. Government. Not once was it mentioned that the blame is squarely on ISL. This wasn't journalism, it was ISL propaganda.

I saw that. Sick what happened but you go into that kind of place you know the risks. Maybe in the early 1970s this was not common knowledge. But today one should know the Feds ain't paying and probably ain't coming for you. But of course C-BS will not dare blame a Muslim terror group.