Vaughan at Mind Hacks has a new post reminiscent of your favorite sci-fi films. Indeed, many world governments are now ordering weapons systems incorporating artificial intelligence. 

Maybe you don’t get the blue screen of death quite as often as I do, but this gives it a whole new meaning. In South Africa a software problem with a robot canon carried out that meaning for nine, now-deceased soldiers serving their country. 

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of weapons systems controlled by artificial intelligence is that scientists and the military fully realize that once they train an artificial intelligence-based weapons system, they don’t understand how it then begins to make decisions and take actions.

“If you examine the ‘weights’ of connections across different instances of the same network after being trained, you can find differences in how they’re distributed even though they seem to be completing the task in the same way.

In other words, simply because we have built and trained something, it does not follow that we can fully control its actions or understand its responses in all situations.” – Mind Hacks

 Interestingly, Peter W. Singer‘s [Brookings Institution] article in the New Atlantis, the trigger for Vaughan’s post, claims that remotely-controlled drone missions now outnumber manned aircraft missions in the US military.

I highly recommend a browse of both Vaughan’s post and the article in the New Atlantis.