Future Timeline

Yuli Ban wrote: ↑Sun Dec 19, 2021 9:31 am It gets worse when you realize that real-life drone swarms sound like Hell itself

(Future of Life Institute) At the beginning of the month, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) released Slaughterbots – if human: kill(), a short film that warns anew of humanity’s accelerating path towards the widespread proliferation of slaughterbots – weapons that use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify, select, and kill people without human intervention. Give it a watch (see opening post of this thread).

Slaughterbots – if human: kill() follows up on FLI’s award-winning short film, Slaughterbots, which went viral back in 2017. The new film depicts a dystopian future in which these weapons have been allowed to become the tool of choice not just for militaries, but any group seeking to achieve scalable violence against a specific group, individual, or population.

When FLI first released Slaughterbots in 2017, some criticized the scenario as unrealistic and technically unfeasible. Since then, however, slaughterbots have been used on the battlefield, and similar, easy-to-make weapons are currently in development, marking the start of a global arms race that currently faces no legal restrictions.

if human: kill() conveys a concrete path to avoid the outcome of which it warns. The vision for action is based on the real-world policy prescription of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an independent, neutral organisation that plays a leading role in the development and promotion of laws regulating the use of weapons. A central tenet of the ICRC’s position is the need to adopt a new, legally binding prohibition on autonomous weapons that target people. FLI agrees with the ICRC’s most recent recommendation that the time has come to adopt legally binding rules on lethal autonomous weapons through a new international treaty.

FLI’s new film has been watched by over 10 million people across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and received substantial media coverage, from outlets such as Axios, Forbes, BBC World Service’s Digital Planet and BBC Click, PopularMechanics, and ProlificNorth. Politico later recommended the film as the best way for readers to clarify for themselves the dangers we face from slaughterbots, and what can be done to prevent them. This places the film well to influence United Nations delegates next week as they meet at the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) review conference. In the meantime, you can still impress upon your national delegates the importance of choosing humanity over Slaughterbots, by signing Amnesty International’s new petition.*