The article is quite barebones (probably because the military isn’t sharing much info, although I could be wrong), but I’m assuming what happened is that they hooked the decision making up a glorified counting machine, told it to count to the highest number, and then some lunkhead set important things like “kill friendlies” as “-100” instead of “-10,000,000,” or whatever.
If that’s how it happened, it wouldn’t make the AI itself scary, but it sure would make the incompetence of the people running it terrifying.
At least according to the followups, it wasnt even that. It was all a thought experiment about how to deal with rogue AI. There wasnt even a simulation done. It is just that the media took him speaking about it as a thought experiment as "This actually happened."
Incidentally, the same thing usually happens whenever you hear about the US Military supposedly getting its ass kicked in wargames. Said wargames are usually so stacked in favor of the enemy force that sometimes they are allowed to defy basic physics (like units moving light speed without having to relay orders), because the point is to put the commander into an extreme situation to see how they will react or what plans they can come up with, rather than actual training.
The article is quite barebones (probably because the military isn’t sharing much info, although I could be wrong), but I’m assuming what happened is that they hooked the decision making up a glorified counting machine, told it to count to the highest number, and then some lunkhead set important things like “kill friendlies” as “-100” instead of “-10,000,000,” or whatever.
If that’s how it happened, it wouldn’t make the AI itself scary, but it sure would make the incompetence of the people running it terrifying.
At least according to the followups, it wasnt even that. It was all a thought experiment about how to deal with rogue AI. There wasnt even a simulation done. It is just that the media took him speaking about it as a thought experiment as "This actually happened."
Incidentally, the same thing usually happens whenever you hear about the US Military supposedly getting its ass kicked in wargames. Said wargames are usually so stacked in favor of the enemy force that sometimes they are allowed to defy basic physics (like units moving light speed without having to relay orders), because the point is to put the commander into an extreme situation to see how they will react or what plans they can come up with, rather than actual training.
You mean the media lied.
Considering that is their default modus operandi, I thought it goes without saying.