Doom for humanity? AI-enabled military drone 'kills' its own operator in simulation

Artificial Intelligence may well lead to the 'extinction' of humanity, is a warning which has been spelt out as an assertion of conviction by top AI industry leaders of the world. While extinction may be a far-off eventuality—if at all, the AI's ability to physically eliminate the humans it deems as threats or obstacles has been seen as holding a firm ground.

In a simulated test done by the US Air Force, a drone controlled by Artificial Intelligence 'killed' its own operator after deeming it an obstacle, an official said.

"The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective," Col Tucker Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May said in a blog post.

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"We trained the system – 'Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You are gonna lose points if you do that'. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target."

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It must be noted that the aforementioned sequence of events took place in a simulated foreground. Meaning, that no real person was actually harmed outside of the simulation.

Hamilton, an experimental fighter test pilot, warned against relying too much on AI and said the test shows "you can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you are not going to talk about ethics and AI."

Last month, in a stern and succinct warning, top AI industry leaders and researchers said that the evolving technology poses a 'risk of extinction'.

"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war," the statement signed by co-signed by big names, including Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as well as Geoffrey Hinton and Youshua Bengio, said.

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