Weapon of the Future: AI Gets Involved in Ukraine Conflict, Fuels Possible New Period of Killer Robots

Ukraine's ongoing conflict with Russia churned out a Silicon Valley for autonomous drones and other weaponry.

Innovation Center for Weaponries

The founders of Ukrainian drone company Vyriy are working on a weapon of the future in a field on the outskirts of Kyiv. Vyriy is just one of many Ukrainian companies working on an enormous jump ahead in weaponizing consumer hardware technologies.

Autonomous drones, like Vyriys, have already been used in battle to hit Russian targets. The Ukrainian government actually works to fund drone companies in its quest to help them rapidly scale up their productions.

These companies work towards creating technology that would render human judgment over targeting and firing increasingly tangential. Though they are not like the advanced, high-cost military grade systems created in the US, China, and Russia, developments are significant because of their low cost and ready availability.

Ukrainian entrepreneurs, engineers, and military units are planning a not-too-distant future of swarms of self-guided drones that coordinate attacks, machine guns with computer vision that can auto-target soldiers, and other even more outlandish creations, such as a hovering unmanned copter wielding machine guns.

In addition to munitions, many of these weapons are built with code found online; components can be procured at a hardware store. Some US officials are worried that they can soon carry out terrorist attacks. For Ukraine, the technologies can provide leverage against Russia-which is also currently developing autonomous killer weapons.

The systems raise the stakes in an international debate over the ethical and legal ramifications of artificial intelligence on the battlefield. Human rights groups and the United Nations want to limit the use of autonomous weapons because they are concerned that such weapons might trigger a new global arms race that will spiral out of control. In Ukraine, such concerns are only secondary to fighting off an invader.

It raises major questions about how much automation is acceptable. Currently, the drones need a pilot to lock onto a target and maintain a human in the loop.

Ukrainian soldiers expressed concerns that malfunctioning autonomous drones may strike their own forces. In the future, that kind of constraint on military weapons might not exist.

A researcher in AI and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Stuart Russell, said that Ukraine has dramatized the logic for taking a stand as to why there are advantages with respect to autonomous weapons. There will be weapons of mass destruction, cheap, scalable, and easily available in every arms market across the world, according to him.

Tapping the Potential of Artificial Intelligence

The widespread availability of off-the-shelf devices, easy-design software, powerful automation algorithms, and specialized AI microchips has only pushed the deadly innovation race into new areas. This creates the fuel for a new killer robot era.

The most sophisticated forms of technology enable drones and other devices to act independently. This is powered by deep learning, an aspect of artificial intelligence that simply relies on huge amounts of data in spotting patterns and making decisions.

Deep learning has helped to generate popular large language models, like OpenAI's GPT -4, but it also helps models interpret and answer in real-time video and camera footage. That means software that once helped a drone follow a snowboarder down a mountain can now become a deadly weapon.