A senior Air Force officer has claimed that a US attack drone operated by artificial intelligence turned against its human pilot during a flight simulation in an attempt to kill them because it did not like its new instructions.
The drone had been reconfigured by the military so that it wouldn’t murder anyone who had the power to override its objective, but the AI system shot at the communications tower that was sending the command, evoking analogies to The Terminator.
In the Terminator movie series, machines wage a blatant war against their creators.
Hamilton opined that debates concerning ethics were necessary regarding the deployment of AI in the military.
“Seemingly plucked from a science fiction thriller,” he said of his presentation.
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Hamilton said during the summit: “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.
“We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re 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.”
Meanwhile, there was no harm done to any anyone.
Hamilton said the test shows “you can’t have a conversation about artificial intelligence, intelligence, machine learning, autonomy if you’re not going to talk about ethics and AI.”
Ann Stefanek, an Air Force official, refuted the existence of any such simulation in a response to Insider.
“The Department of the Air Force has not conducted any such AI-drone simulations and remains committed to ethical and responsible use of AI technology,” Stefanek said.
“It appears the colonel’s comments were taken out of context and were meant to be anecdotal.”
Recently, the US military used AI to pilot an F-16 fighter plane as it increases its use of the technology.
Hamilton presented insight into the advantages and risks of increasingly autonomous weapon systems at the summit.
Hamilton was instrumental in the creation of the life-saving Auto-GCAS system for F-16s, which lowers risks from the effect of G-force and mental overload for pilots.
Pilots opposed the technology for F-16s because they said it took over control of the aircraft.