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Report Cites Dangers of Autonomous Weapons

Photo credit: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters

By John Markoff

A new report written by a former Pentagon official who helped establish United States policy on autonomous weapons argues that such weapons could be uncontrollable in real-world environments where they are subject to design failure as well as hacking, spoofing and manipulation by adversaries.

In recent years, low-cost sensors and new artificial intelligence technologies have made it increasingly practical to design weapons systems that make killing decisions without human intervention. The specter of so-called killer robots has touched off an international protest movement and a debate within the United Nations about limiting the development and deployment of such systems.

The new report was written by Paul Scharre, who directs a program on the future of warfare at the Center for a New American Security, a policy research group in Washington, D.C. From 2008 to 2013, Mr. Scharre worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense, where he helped establish United States policy on unmanned and autonomous weapons. He was one of the authors of a 2012 Defense Department directive that set military policy on the use of such systems.

In the report, titled “Autonomous Weapons and Operational Risk,” set to be published on Monday, Mr. Scharre warns about a range of real-world risks associated with weapons systems that are completely autonomous.

The report contrasts these completely automated systems, which have the ability to target and kill without human intervention, to weapons that keep humans “in the loop” in the process of selecting and engaging targets.

Mr. Scharre, who served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, focuses on the potential types of failures that might occur in completely automated systems, as opposed to the way such weapons are intended to work. To underscore the military consequences of technological failures, the report enumerates a history of the types of failures that have occurred in military and commercial systems that are highly automated.

“Anyone who has ever been frustrated with an automated telephone call support helpline, an alarm clock mistakenly set to ‘p.m.’ instead of ‘a.m.,’ or any of the countless frustrations that come with interacting with computers, has experienced the problem of ‘brittleness’ that plagues automated systems,” Mr. Scharre writes.

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When will the universe end? Not for at least 2.8 billion years

Photo credit: Mina De La O/Getty

By New Scientist

We’re safe for now. The way the universe is expanding, it won’t be tearing itself apart for at least a few billion years.

For those of you only now discovering that such an end was a possibility, here’s a little background. Observations of stars and galaxies indicate that the universe is expanding, and at an increasing rate. Assuming that acceleration stays constant, eventually the stars will die out, everything will drift apart, and the universe will cool into an eternal “heat death”.

But that’s not the only possibility. The acceleration is thought to be due to dark energy, mysterious stuff that permeates the entire universe. If the total amount of dark energy is increasing, the acceleration will also increase, eventually to the point where the very fabric of space-time tears itself apart and the cosmos pops out of existence.

One prediction puts this hypothetical “big rip” scenario 22 billion years in the future. But could it happen sooner? To find out, Diego Sáez-Gómez at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and his colleagues modelled a variety of scenarios and used the latest expansion data to calculate a likely timeline. The data involved nearby galaxies, supernovae and ripples in the density of matter known as baryon acoustic oscillations, all of which are used to measure dark energy.

The team found that the earliest a big rip can occur is at 1.2 times the current age of the universe, which works out to be around 2.8 billion years from now. “We’re safe,” says Sáez-Gómez.

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This Week in Science (Feb. 21 – 28)

This is a collection of the 10 best and most popular stories from science and technology over the past 7 days. Scroll down and click the individual images below to read the stories and follow the This Week in Science on Wakelet (here) to get these weekly updates straight to your inbox every Sunday.

The Ends of Philosophy

What is the point of philosophy? As science claims to tell us more and more about reality, does philosophy need to reconsider its relationship to reason and to truth?
In this issue of IAI News, philosopher, author and musician, Andrew Bowie, argues that philosophy has failed in its task to justify what we think we know. Reason alone, he says, cannot uncover reality. But could paying more attention to the arts help philosophers ask new, more vital, questions?
Within the framework outlined by Bowie, philosopher Justin Diekemper and theoretical physicist Julian Barbour continue their head-to-head debate from last issue. At stake is the very nature of time. Diekemper argues that if we are ever really to understand time, then we cannot do without philosophy. But Barbour disagrees: science will ultimately take precedence over philosophy, he says.
Meanwhile, two very different thinkers tackle the thorny question of identity. Entrepreneur, CEO and author Margaret Heffernan argues that ignoran...

Diekemper vs Barbour: The Dance of Time – part 4

Read part 1: Joseph Diekemper argues that the present is only a border between past and future. Read part 2: Julian Barbour replies that arguing over past and future is to miss what really matters. Read part 3: Diekemper underlines the necessity of philosophy to our understanding of time. Read part 4: Barbour disagrees: science will ultimately always take precedence over philosophy.
___In response to Joseph Diekemper, I think science will ultimately always take precedence over philosophy, which, I would say, is at its best when questioning existing concepts and suggesting ideas to science.
Moving on to the specific points, Diekemper says his "definition of the passage of time would be stated in terms of events having occurred". But how do you know an event has occurred? I think the minimum requirement is a difference in the world; I should have emphasized difference rather than change. Moreover, in connection with what we call the passage of time, the nature of the difference is genera...

Diekemper vs Barbour: The Dance of Time – part 3

Read part 1: Joseph Diekemper argues that the present is only a border between past and future. Read part 2: Julian Barbour replies that arguing over past and future is to miss what really matters. Read part 3: Diekemper underlines the necessity of philosophy to our understanding of time. Read part 4: Barbour disagrees: science will ultimately always take precedence over philosophy.___I am grateful to Julian Barbour for his response to my article, The Dance of Time. In this brief counter response, I will make a general observation followed by two specific points.
I think a very clear observation emerges from what Barbour says: given the complexities of the concept of time, and given that current scientific data underdetermine the nature of time, one must rely on philosophical argumentation – at some stage – in deciding how to fill out the details of the concept. It is another matter, of course, whether science could, in principle, ever be complete enough to fully determine the nature o...

Wilful Blindness

Are you the sum total of your experiences – or a sum total of your memories? The fact that the two are so wildly different isn’t only because, over time, memories fade. It is also because we may not fully experience what we see in front of us at the time.
In my book, Wilful Blindness, I was intrigued by the common human experience in which we ignore crucial information, people, events that stare us in the face. Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and, later on, the man responsible for supplying the army with manpower, weapons and material, famously could not remember what he had known of Hitler’s final solution. He wasn’t sure whether he’d been at the Wannsee conference or, if he had, how long he had stayed. And this was not because he believed himself innocent – he pleaded guilty at Nuremberg – but because, event under intense and sustained interrogation by Gitta Sereny, he simply could not remember.
Many people believed Speer lied. But Sereny considered Speer’s experience. He ...

Guns and Butter

Early in 2014, Obama teased Putin that we had grown out of military solutions. That was before Russia invaded Ukraine and US bombers returned to the Middle East. Is it a fantasy to imagine that the economy has replaced the barrel of the gun as the real source of power? Or is this a short cut to Armageddon?
Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at Oxford University. He is also a regular presenter of Night Waves and contributor to The Financial Times, History Today, and the London Review of Books.
Here, he speaks to the IAI about China’s global economic vision and the difference between soft power and military strength.
 
In the debate on IAI TV you argued that economic power has trumped military strength around the globe. Could you expand on that? How has that taken place?
I was thinking specifically about the Asia-Pacific region. On the one hand there’s a very obvious and, in some ways, alarming story about the growth in military power. The most obvious e...

Secret Thoughts, Hidden Desires?

We like to think of ourselves as being in control of our own thoughts, decisions and actions – what we say and what we do. But how much do our conscious thoughts and intentions guide our actions?  How far does the writ of the conscious mind reach? And just how much of our behaviour comes under its control?
Contemporary neuroscience has been responsible for de-throning consciousness from its central place in the workings of the mind. It is no longer thought of as exercising constant vigilance and guidance over our actions. Instead, many of the things we set out to do happen because of fast and automatic processes in the brain that ensure the fluency of our actions. We anticipate a great deal based on past patterns of perception and action, and this takes the strain off the conscious mind; though the conscious mind still assumes that it is involved in and orchestrating even the simplest actions. We imagine that when we reach for a cup in front of us that we are guiding our hand on the ba...

How Many Sugary Drinks Do People In The U.S. Drink?

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Drinking sugary beverages in excess has been linked with various health problems. Jonas Lamis/Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services released some strict new guidelines that suggested sugar should only make up a tenth of our daily calories. Understandably, big-time soda companies weren’t too pleased.