You Are John Connor... The Rise of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems
In the Cold War, the only thing that stopped the world from ending was a single person. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov stared at a screen insisting that American missiles were inbound and decided not to believe it - a single human refusal lodged in an automated kill chain, and the sole reason there was a tomorrow. This talk is about what happens when we engineer that person out of the loop. Lethal autonomy is descending not just from a Pentagon budget; it ’s arriving on your feed. Open-source targeting code, a microcontroller, a webcam, and a printed lower receiver now put a computer-vision sniper station within reach of a teenager looking for the likes. We have watched this film before: Fritz Haber pulled nitrogen from the air to feed billions and won a Nobel Prize, then personally directed the first chlorine gas use - one mind, one chemistry, feeding and killing, and once that knowledge was loose, it never went back in the bottle. The chemicals to make chlorine gas likely sit under your sink, but our norms prevent us from using it. Autonomous lethality is now tracing the exact democratization curve of chemical weapons, except the barrier to entry is a GitHub repo and under $200 in parts, and by the time the opposition to it develops it may be too late. The battlefield future is already the present: according to Reuters a drone “kill zone” now reaches some 15 kilometers each side behind the front in Ukraine. A strip where nothing human can move without attack. That strip of death is coming globally in the next decade in robotic assisted genocide situations to population centers worldwide. The title isn’ t a joke. In a world racing to delete the human who can say no, the people in this room - the ones who actually build these systems - are the last Petrov. You are John Connor. The question this talk asks is how you can act like it.
Saturday 1800 Crystal Ballroom