US has 'moral imperative' to develop AI weapons, says panel
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021...says-panel
EXCERPTS: The US should not agree to ban the use or development of autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI) software, a government-appointed panel has said in a draft report for Congress.
[...] Its vice-chairman, Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense, said autonomous weapons are expected to make fewer mistakes than humans do in battle, leading to reduced casualties or skirmishes caused by target misidentification. “It is a moral imperative to at least pursue this hypothesis,” he said.
[...] For about eight years, a coalition of non-governmental organisations has pushed for a treaty banning “killer robots”, saying human control is necessary to judge attacks’ proportionality and assign blame for war crimes. Thirty countries including Brazil and Pakistan want a ban, according to the coalition’s website, and a UN body has held meetings on the systems since at least 2014.
While autonomous weapon capabilities are decades old, concern has mounted with the development of AI to power such systems, along with research finding biases in AI and examples of the software’s abuse.
[...] The panel only wants humans to make decisions on launching nuclear warheads. Still, the panel prefers anti-proliferation work to a treaty banning the systems, which it said would be against US interests and difficult to enforce. ... The commission is due to submit its final report to Congress in March, but the recommendations are not binding... (
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What Happens to the Space Force Now? President Biden is inheriting one of Trump’s pet projects.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...en/617812/
EXCERPTS: The headquarters of the United States
Space Command was supposed to be based in Colorado. [...] The Space Command is not the same thing as the
Space Force, which was created in 2019 (and which, by the way, is not the same thing as NASA, either). The Space Force trains service members, some of whom serve under Space Command. But in Trump’s mind, they are wrapped up together, as one of his signature accomplishments.
[...] Trump leaves behind a small controversy. On the day he was impeached for the second time, his administration announced that the headquarters would not stay in Colorado, but would relocate—to Alabama. The Air Force, the department overseeing the search, had twice recommended Colorado over other sites under consideration, in late 2019 and again this year, according to a former senior defense official who served in the Trump presidency. ... “This was a political decision by the White House,” the former defense official told me. “The service recommended Colorado, and everyone expects the new administration will reopen this.”
The decision roiled Colorado lawmakers in both parties; Democrats said out loud that Trump had prioritized politics over the command’s 1,400 military and civilian workers and their families. Florida Senator Rick Scott said in a statement to The Atlantic that he’s disappointed his state wasn’t chosen, and that he is “reviewing the decision.” Alabama Senator Richard Shelby said in a statement to The Atlantic that “it’s our understanding that Huntsville was, in fact, the recommendation of the Air Force, and for good reason.”
[...] The Biden administration could have an easy time unwinding the headquarters decision, one of the many Trump-era policies it will likely roll back. But though the Space Force has often been treated as the butt of a bad joke, it is one Trump initiative that will last. It may not be the grand, legacy-making organization Trump imagined, but the Space Force isn’t going anywhere.
In the last year, the Space Force has slowly transformed into a real military service. The branch, which primarily oversees satellite operations, has debuted its own seal, organizational structure, and terminology. It has already deployed its first troops—not into space, but to the Middle East, where they’ll support combat operations that rely on space systems.
Abolishing the force would require an act of Congress, and the legislature doesn’t seem to have an appetite for that. At Biden’s inauguration ceremony, the Space Force flag appeared on the Capitol along with the flag of the other armed forces. “Nobody’s debating whether the Space Force should exist,” Jared Zambrano-Stout, an aerospace consultant and a former chief of staff for the Trump administration’s National Space Council, told me. “They’re debating about what it should be doing.”
Which puts President Joe Biden in an interesting predicament. The Space Force has always been more boring than its name implies, amounting to some organizational reshuffling of Air Force personnel and operations. But Trump has used it to fuel his own vision of American bravado, which his supporters have adopted. On the day of the Capitol attack, some supporters in Washington, D.C., and around the country complemented their Trump regalia with Space Force flags. With Trump gone, the new administration now finds itself having to embrace a piece of government saturated with MAGA spin and disdained by the left, and make it seem as ordinary as it actually is.
But an armed service dedicated to space operations is not a Trump invention. The concept emerged in the 1990s.. (
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