The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems
Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it. Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons. The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day.
Yuval Shany is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics in AI Institute. He also served on the UN Human Rights Committee, where he first encountered the legal and ethical challenges posed by autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on the intersection of international humanitarian law, human rights, and emerging military technologies.
In this episode, Yuval joins Matt Merrill for a wide-ranging conversation. They cover topics including how close we are to fully autonomous lethal weapons, the accountability gap that AI-mediated warfare creates, and what lessons software engineers can draw from these challenges when building consequential AI systems of any kind.
Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in backend development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at DEPT® Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com.
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Do You Need a New iPhone? + Yuval Noah Harari’s A.I. Fears + Hard Fork Crimes Division
Apple unveiled its latest gadgets at its big September event on Monday. We discuss the most interesting new features — including AirPods that can function as hearing aids and Apple Watch software that can help detect sleep apnea — and offer our advice on when to buy a new iPhone. Then, the best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari joins us to discuss his new book and his biggest fears about A.I. And finally, we crack open some criminal cases in a new segment we’re calling the Hard Fork Crimes Division. We’ll explain how one man made $10 million by manipulating music streaming services and how online instructions for building a 3D-printed gun have ended up in the hands of criminals around the world.
Guest:
Yuval Noah Harari, author of “Sapiens,” “Homo Deus” and “Nexus.”
Additional Reading:
Apple Unveils New iPhones With Built-In Artificial Intelligence
Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media
He’s Known as ‘Ivan the Troll.’ His 3D-Printed Guns Have Gone Viral.
The Bands and the Fans Were Fake. The $10 Million Was Real.
We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube and TikTok.
Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.
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Will AI Kill Democracy? | Yuval Noah Harari
Today on a special in-person recording of Bankless we welcome special guest and best selling author, Yuval Noah Harari. Yuval is best known for his book Sapiens, and today, he is introducing ideas from his next book Nexus.
We go deep down the history rabbit hole and explore the question, if human beings are so wise, why are we so self destructive?
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------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Start 00:08:07 The World of Information Networks 00:10:59 Truth vs Information 00:21:28 Tribal Consequences 00:25:05 Naive View Of Information 00:34:27 Populist View Of Information 00:44:54 Inventing New Mechanisms 00:53:33 A Brief History Of Information Networks 00:58:43 The Most Successful Story Ever Told 01:05:13 Story vs Information Network 01:12:29 Story Of Debt Clay Tablets 01:14:53 Entering the Age Of AI 01:20:50 Self Correcting Mechanisms 01:25:35 The Potential Of Crypto
------ RESOURCES
Yuval: https://www.ynharari.com/
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Green AI 🌲
Empirical analysis from Roy Schwartz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Jesse Dodge (AI2) suggests the AI research community has paid relatively little attention to computational efficiency. A focus on accuracy rather than efficiency increases the carbon footprint of AI research and increases research inequality. In this episode, Jesse and Roy advocate for increased research activity in Green AI (AI research that is more environmentally friendly and inclusive). They highlight success stories and help us understand the practicalities of making our workflows more efficient.
Sponsors:
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Code-ish by Heroku – A podcast from the team at Heroku, exploring code, technology, tools, tips, and the life of the developer. Check out episode 98 and episode 99 for insights on the ethical and technical sides of deep fakes. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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Featuring:
Roy Schwartz – Website, X
Jesse Dodge – X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Green AI article in the communications of the ACM
Training a single AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars in their lifetimes
Fine-Tuning Pretrained Language Models: Weight Initializations, Data Orders, and Early Stopping
Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP
Reproducibility at EMNLP 2020
Upcoming Events:
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Journal Club: A New Path to Antibiotic Resistance
Ever since the discovery of antibiotics, microbiologists have worried about and studied how bacteria acquire resistance to these drugs. Adding to the complexity of this problem is the fact that it is not always clear whether the conditions that drive the evolution of resistance in the lab occur in patients suffering from bacterial infections.
This is where the work of Nathalie Balaban -- Professor at the Hebrew University, and our guest on this episode -- comes in. The article we discuss is based on a foundation of research done in her laboratory, but this study makes the important step into the clinic by using samples from a patient with a life-threatening bacterial (MRSA) infection. By analyzing these patient samples, Dr. Balaban and her team were able to understand the conditions that lead to multi-drug resistance in a hospital setting. The work reveals how the ability of bacteria to enter a state of dormancy, also known as tolerance, can act as a stepping stone to resistance and can interfere with the efficacy of drug combinations. Our conversation covers what tolerance is, the conditions that promote tolerance, how it can lead to resistance and impact drug combination therapies, and lastly, integrating this new understanding into clinical microbiology protocols.
"Effect of tolerance on the evolution of antibiotic resistance under drug combinations" in Science (January 2020) by Jiafeng Liu, Orit Gefen, Irine Ronin, Maskit Bar-Meir, Nathalie Q. Balaban.
a16z bio Journal Club (part of the a16z Podcast), curates and covers recent advances from the scientific literature -- what papers we’re reading, and why they matter from our perspective at the intersection of biology & technology (for bio journal club). You can find all these episodes at a16z.com/journalclub.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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a16z Podcast: Brains, Bodies, Minds ... and Techno-Religions
Evolution and technology have allowed our human species to manipulate the physical environment around us -- reshaping fields into cities, redirecting rivers to irrigate farms, domesticating wild animals into captive food sources, conquering disease. But now, we're turning that "innovative gaze" inwards: which means the main products of the 21st century will be bodies, brains, and minds. Or so argues Yuval Harari, author of the bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind and of the new book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in this episode of the a16z Podcast.
What happens when our body parts no longer have to be physically co-located? When Big Brother -- whether government or corporation -- not only knows everything about us, but can make better decisions for us than we could for ourselves? That's ridiculous, you say. Sure... until you stop to think about how such decisions already, actually happen. Or realize that an AI-based doctor and teacher will have way more information than their human counterparts because of what can be captured, through biometric sensors, from inside (not just observed outside) us.
So what happens then when illusions collide with reality? As it is, religion itself is "a virtual reality game that provides people with meaning by imposing imaginary rules on an objective reality". Is Data-ism the new religion? From education, automation, war, energy, and jobs to universal basic income, inequality, human longevity, and climate change, Harari (with a16z's Sonal Chokshi and Kyle Russell) reflect on what's possible, probable, pressing -- and is mere decades, not centuries, away -- when man becomes god... or merges with machines.
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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
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