Should Artificial Intelligence Be Used In The Development Of Weapons

Many people fear the implications that technology can have on society and the human race as a whole. Artificial intelligence in particular, or AI, has created much controversy about whether or not it should be used. A dangerous application of AI is using it in the programming of harmful weapons and the development of autonomous weapons. According to Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist and futurist, “superintelligence by its nature cannot be controlled” (Kurzweil, 2010). Because of this, the U.S government should ban AI used in the development of weapons. This is a good and plausible solution to the dangers AI has and the further dangers that can result from the continued use of AI.
In order to regulate artificial intelligence, you have to know
moves in a chess game or inferences by a theorem proving program. “Discoveries are continually made about how to do this more efficiently in various domains” (Xiuquan, Hongling, 2017). AI is also programmed to recognize patterns in various situations. When a program makes observations of some kind, it is often programmed to compare what it sees with a pattern. For example, a vision program may try to match a pattern of eyes and a nose in a scene in order to find a face. More complex patterns, e.g. in a natural language text, in a chess position, or in the history of some event are also studied. These more complex patterns require quite different methods than do the simple patterns that have been studied the most. AI can even be used in computers to create three-dimensional vision. The world is composed of three-dimensional objects, but the inputs to the human eye and computers TV cameras are two dimensional. Some useful programs can work solely in two dimensions, but full computer vision requires partial three-dimensional information that is not just a set of two-dimensional views. At present there are only limited ways of representing three-dimensional information directly, and they are not as good as what humans evidently use; nevertheless, there are still uses for this, such as a targeting system in a military drone. One of the most feasible kinds of expert system given the present knowledge of AI is to
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria (Pogue, 2015). Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable (2017, Underwood). Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc (Pogue, 2015). An AI arms race would not be beneficial for