• 2 Posts
  • 85 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

help-circle



  • I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

    From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

    Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it’s inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven’t already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

    (Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

    The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

    I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

    EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.











  • “Yes I’m weird, and I should be. Jesus didn’t tell us to be of the world, he only told us to be in the world. We don’t conform to that world, and we never will. Don’t hide your light under that bushel, but stand against the darkness that threatens to creep in. Stand against the devil and his minions. Stand against transexuals, leftists, and the woke mob. Stand against the abortionists, the evolutionists, and the false god of science. And when you do, every brother and sister here will stand with you. And all God’s people say-” [crowd] ‘Amen!’.

    A preview of things to come. Please excuse me while I go rinse my brain out.



  • The most basic way to measure movement is with an accelerometer. It’s a little component inside your phone that has a small weight with a known mass connected to springs. When the phone moves or rotates, the weight moves, and the tension on the springs changes. The tension is either constant (you rotated your phone and are now holding it in the new position) or temporary (you moved in a direction and stopped). There are other ways this can be done, but this is the most conceptually simple.

    Steps, length of step, distance moved, and heart rate can be estimated from analyzing the movement in various ways.

    For example, to detect a step, your phone might see movement slightly up and forward, then down, then a jarring impact. Heart rate can be estimated based on your entered weight in an app, your speed of movement, how long you’ve been moving, and averages for people of your weight moving in those ways. This is a very inaccurate way to measure your heart rate, however. A better way would be by a sensor located on your wrist, arm, or chest, which is what smart watches often do.

    Movement measured by an accelerometer can quickly become inaccurate, because small errors add up over time, so for movement over longer distances, phones generally use GPS (communication with a satellite positioning system) which is accurate to within about 5 meters.

    If GPS isn’t available, but the phone is connected to multiple cell phone towers, then it’s possible to triangulate the position of the phone given the tower locations. If we know the distance and direction to the towers, and the position of the towers, then we can find the location of the phone by basically adding an offset to one of the tower locations.

    There are other, more niche ways to measure positions without triangulation or GPS, but they’re generally used for autonomous robotics - laser positioning with reflectors, ultra-wide-band positioning with special sensors, or visual positioning with cameras surrounding the region in which the robot will be working.

    Let me know if you have any further questions.