The U.S. Navy will avoid a "Terminator" scenario, referring to the film franchise in which a military computer network tries to wipe out humanity, when it comes to autonomous weapons, Defense News reports.
Steve Olsen, the deputy branch head in the Navy's mine warfare office, said that although the service is working on autonomous systems for military purposes and has seen success with getting these systems to work together on complicated assignments, the developers are very aware of the potential dangers.
"Trust is something that is difficult to come by with a computer, especially as we start working with our test and evaluation community," Olsen said. "I've worked with our test and evaluation director, and a lot of times it's: 'Hey, what's that thing going to do?' And I say: 'I don't know, it's going to pick the best path.'
"And they don't like that at all because autonomy makes a lot of people nervous," he added. "But the flip side of this is that there is one thing that we have to be very careful of, and that's that we don't over-trust. Everybody has seen on the news [when people] over-trusted their Tesla car. That is something that we can't do when we talk about [a] weapons system."
Olsen said, "The last thing we want to see is the whole 'Terminator going crazy [scenario],' so we're working very hard to take the salient steps to protect ourselves and others."
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