Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

What Hacker News said

Strong rec jameslk · 2025-08 · on “AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study”

There's likely a slippery slope fallacy in there somewhere (I hope). If interested in the (not so) sci-fi aspects of automated weapons and their ramifications, I often plug Daniel Suarez's great Kill Decision talk and book: [this video]

Recommends salient · 2013-12 · on “I worked on the US drone program. The public should know what really goes on”

This is only going to get worse if they make drones autonomous, which this TED talk shows they have a lot of reasons for why they will want to make them autonomous, unless there's huge public outcry demanding a ban: [this video]

Recommends higherpurpose · 2014-10 · on “Musk warns of 'summoning the demon' with AI”

When you see governments already contemplating killing people based on algorithms, you begin to empathize with Musk about calling AI a "demon" that we're summoning: [LINK] However right now I'm much more afraid of governments "setting loose" autonomous killer robots than I am about Skynet-like self-conscious killer robots (which may be what Musk is thinking about). To the people being on the receiving end of the autonomous killer robots' missiles, it won't be much difference, though. They would already be living a "Terminator-like" future, where they have to "fight the machines". Relevant talk by Daniel Suarez: [this video]

Cites unono · 2013-09 · on “Who Will Prosper in the New World”

There's a lot wrong with that article. If the computer is smart enough to tell you what to do in social situations and can also read, write, and drive cars, the game is pretty much up. There will be nothing humans can do that computers can't. The best thing to do will be to plug everyone in to the Matrix, because otherwise millions of wars between people with really smart computers will break out. Wars that will feature weapons designed by smart computers i.e. drones with nuclear/chemical/biological weapons - deadly enough to kill everyone. The safest route for humans in the coming years is for global scale cooperation to create a basic income, not a stipend, but self-contained self-sufficie

Cites higherpurpose · 2014-01 · on “Google’s Ray Kurzweil predicts how the world will change”

What might happen is what I heard recently being called the "morality apocalypse" [1], i.e. technology is improving so fast, but we're not going to use it properly, probably not unlike when US used the atomic bomb on Japan the first time. It was a time when discovering the atomic bomb surpassed our morality by a long shot, and it took quite a few decades for our morality to catch-up to the technology, and understand that countries must not use atomic bombs against each other. I fear the same will happen when we start using autonomous killer robots [2] (whether drones, or real Terminator-like robots), or when we learn how to make killer mosquito-sized drones that can assassinate anyone in the

Cites higherpurpose · 2014-02 · on “The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program”

Jacob Appelbaum has been saying this for a while already. They use NSA's data to do "signature strikes", i.e. strikes where they may assassinate someone only based on the "harmless metadata" they have on him. Talked to someone who may have talked to someone else from a "terrorist organization"? Well, you may now be on a drone target list. This is going to get exponentially worse as they move to automated drone assassinations, where they just create an "algorithm" that's supposed to decide who is going to die next. This is going to be their next logical conclusion, and to them it's "inevitable". Of course, it will be done in secret, too, probably for years before there are even leaks about it