Future wars of independence: Novelist Jon Wallace considers the science fiction implications of engineering stories that have caught his eye. This month, the disturbing future of autonomous weapons

摘要

What exactly is it that we find so unnerving about the proliferation of autonomous weapons systems? Reporting on the 2017 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, The Engineer quotes one robotics developer's fears that "unlike other potential manifestations of AI that remain the realm of science fiction, autonomous weapons systems... have a real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people". True: but so do the weapons already in mankind's bristling arsenal. We cannot claim control even of these: the minefields of Afghanistan, Angola, Croatia and Cambodia hold plenty of extremely dumb weapons granted autonomy enough by their haphazard scattering.