AI Package Delivery Drones Are Just Killer Robots In Waiting

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/19/ai-package-delivery-drones-are-just-killer-robots-in-waiting/

As governments across the world continue to debate the merits and dangers of AI-powered fully autonomous weapons, it is worth stepping back a moment and looking critically at the state of the autonomous landscape. Advances in everything from consumer drones to facial recognition to autonomous flight are yielding a constant march of advances in fully autonomous drones capable of navigating the human environment and delivering items to specific individuals. While most of the press has focused on the positives of these new systems, militaries around the world have been eagerly transforming these tools into weapons systems. Modified civilian drones today are capable of navigating denied spaces, seeking targets based on facial recognition and delivering lethal force, all using the same tools and technology being built by universities and companies for helpful tasks like package delivery drones to deliver aid to disaster regions. What does the future look like when we realize that AI-powered package delivery drones are really just autonomous weapons in waiting?

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Universities and companies across the world have been rushing to build package delivery drones capable of navigating complex urban environments entirely on their own and even coordinating with other drones.

While the developers of these drone systems are building systems for good, the Islamic State reminds us that one person’s package delivery drone is another person’s autonomous weapons system.

In fact, universities, companies and militaries all over the world are already building killer robots with society’s fully encouragement and blessing: drone-killing drones.

As consumer drones have caused chaos at airports, threatened public safety and stalked us through our bedroom windows, there has been a growing societal consensus of a greater need to combat illicit use of drones.

This, in turn, has led to the growing world of anti-drone technology. Ranging from simple RF jammers to EMP pulse systems to high-powered lasers to projectile systems to emerging exotic technologies, the ability to bring down an errant drone in flight has become a major focus of public safety officials, especially regarding their danger to aircraft and public gatherings.

One technology with particular relevance to autonomous weapons is the drone-killing drone. These modified civilian drones are equipped with various sensors and navigation systems and designed to identify an unauthorized drone and bring it down through various means.

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There are systems for scanning military uniforms for rank indicators on bases and in the battlefield, allowing autonomous weapons to target senior officers automatically under an interpretation that they represent more permissible targets for autonomous weapons than enlisted personnel.

More troubling, there are already military drones with onboard facial recognition databases that can be launched to scan a large public gathering and identify any persons of interest. These individuals could simply be tracked and filmed for reconnaissance or marked with infrared lasers for ground security forces or dropping marking dye on them. Experimental systems have even been designed to identify individuals in a crowd carrying weapons or behaving in a violent or disruptive manner.

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Putting this all together, while policymakers slowly debate the dangers of autonomous weapons systems in abstract terms, those very systems are already being deployed across the world, but in an unexpected form. Rather than the bipedal walking Terminator units of science fiction or traditional military drones the size of small planes, autonomous weapons-capable military systems have come into widespread use through civilian drones.

Most importantly, their autonomy has come entirely through consumer AI platforms, making them readily portable to a wide range of weapons systems.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE @https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/04/19/ai-package-delivery-drones-are-just-killer-robots-in-waiting/