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Comment by hourago | Hacker News Reader

As bad as nuclear weapons are, they still have a human being behind.

> My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being.

You can solve the problem by giving the decision to an AI... the AI will not even blink before killing the human and getting the codes. Nuclear war would come fast and swift.

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Do they, though?

Didn't Russia have the dead man's hand system where any detected launches would result in a completely automatic response?

But in the reality of an arm's race, I guess the core point is that we either: respond to autonomous weapons with our own and break our principle of having a human in the loop, or accept that our offence/defence with a human in the loop is not fast enough to keep up with an enemy's fully autonomous systems, thereby just completely giving up.

Just as with nuclear weapons, the unfortunate outcome isn't "well they're bad so we don't want them" but instead it's "we don't want these, but we have to out of necessity".

What if Russia was the only country with nuclear weapons and all other countries held steadfast principles of not building any nuclear weapons? Pretty obvious outcomes to be honest.

Dead hand was probably (though to what confidence I don't know) people in a remote mountain bunker. It's not actually any better to have the computer fire, it just provides the people information. Retaliation does not have to be instant, 40 minutes is probably good enough.

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) - Second-Strike Capability : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction#Sec...

>Perfect detection

No false positives (errors) in the equipment and/or procedures that must identify a launch by the other side.

The implication of this is that an accident could lead to a full nuclear exchange.

During the Cold War there were several instances of false positives, as in the case of Stanislav Petrov[2].

[2] Stanislav Petrov : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

[2] 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm Incident : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...

That's my entire problem with AI or any machine decision. It has zero emotion, zero empathy, zero care.

Imagine if AI were running the subs in the Cold War. None of us would probably even be here. We may be stupid creatures, but we're still creatures...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

As someone else commented, so do some humans.

But if a system is designed with empathy/rules/etc in mind by an empathetic designer/committee then that system is already > than a heartless individual even if they are human.

You cannot 'program' emotion. You can probably get semi-close by trying it your way, in the same way that Tesla is semi-close to FSD. There's too many edge cases to make it perfectly humane.

Empathy != experiencing emotions necessarily, just being aware of it.

We wouldn't want to program emotion into a killing machine anyway. Emotions are messy, meatbag programs that make us do suboptimal things driven by our own cultural, societal and personal biases.

Trolley problem where one side is one person who is dear to you, other side is two people you don't know. The majority of people would save the person they know well even if two innocent but unknown people die.

Also we probably can't specifically program emotion until we understand it better, but I reckon we'll see emotions/similar concepts arise as we build more intelligent machines. Humans are not special, we're just meat computers.

> It has zero emotion, zero empathy, zero care.

So do some humans.

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