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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Is everything conscious? (David)
2. Re: Is everything conscious? (Stephen Loosley)
3. Smart weapon drones (Stephen Loosley)
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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 16:56:44 +1100
From: David <[email protected]>
To: Antony Barry <[email protected]>, Stephen Loosley
<[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [LINK] Is everything conscious?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On 8/10/24 16:26, Antony Barry wrote:
> My problem with this is that there is no clear definition of what
> consciousness is.? [...]
My problem with the piece in question is that distorts the whole idea of
consciousness into New-Age mysticism.
As Tony says,we need to predict the behaviour of other animals.? We also need
to be able to interpret the world around us generally, not just the likely
taste of that rabbit or that tiger's assessment of my taste (!) but whether we
need to move to higher ground because the weather looks bad.? Or whether
efforts to show General Relativity is fundamentally quantum mechanical are
misguided (because GR has no need of QM?).
Or indeed, what is the nature of consciousness?
My own personal and hypothetical view is that "consciousness" began as a set of
purely automatic reactions to environment.? As organisms became mobile and
began to form simple neural pathways, evolution would have accelerated
development enormously.? And at some point probably more than one evolutionary
line would have developed an awareness of their own autonomy in that
environment, and I'd argue that's the dawning of consciousness.
I can't help adding that our sensory understanding of the external world is
obtained through pulse-frequency modulated signals in nerve fibres, where the
frequency of nerve discharges is a function of the intensity of the stimulus.?
So all our sensory understanding of the world is pieced together indirectly in
our brains.? I suppose we could say it's an imagined world which our species
(and our evolutionary precursors) has collectively decided reflects reality.?
And humanity has duly formalised it into natural language,
But stones...? NO!!
Sorry, that went on for too long!
_David Lochrin_
On 8/10/24 16:26, Antony Barry wrote:
> My problem with this is that there is no clear definition of what
> consciousness is. Certainly, we need to predict the behavior of other
> animals. How will that tasty rabbit behave when I try to catch it? If the
> tiger likely to want to eat me. We need an insite into their minds. Perhaps
> consciousness is a recursive use of predicting behavior applied to yourself.
> Until we can clearly define what we mean by consciousness we can't say
> whether rocks or trees are conscious.
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Message: 2
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 20:00:24 +1100
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: David <[email protected]>, Antony Barry
<[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [LINK] Is everything conscious?
Message-ID:
<sy5p282mb44094e96077cee89296fe9dac2...@sy5p282mb4409.ausp282.prod.outlook.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 10/10/2024 4:56 pm, kindly David writes:
> On 8/10/24 16:26, Antony Barry wrote:
>
>> My problem with this is that there is no clear definition of what
>> consciousness is. [...]
>
> My problem with the piece in question is that distorts the whole idea of
> consciousness into New-Age mysticism.
Wouldn't dismiss our original panpsychism as mysticism :)
> In Western philosophy panpsychism goes all the way back to the Ancient
> Greeks, where philosophers like Thales, Heraclitus, and Plato espoused
> some version of it. And from Hindus in India to followers of Shintoism
> in Japan to the Indigenous peoples of America many people believed and
> still believe that animals, plants, and, elements of the natural world
> are conscious.
> As Tony says,we need to predict the behaviour of other animals.?We also
> need to be able to interpret the world around us generally.. So all our
> sensory understanding of the world is pieced together indirectly in
> our brains.? I suppose we could say it's an imagined world .. >
> But stones...? NO!!
>
What about electrons, they do know we are watching and act accordingly
Just maybe everything above absolute zero Kelvin energy has life-force
Anyway, I love the Vendanta philosophy with nearly everything as a god
Happy trails
est. Linkers
------------------------------
Message: 3
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 21:34:38 +1030
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] Smart weapon drones
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
First-person drone piloting is yesterday?s news.
Drones are becoming smarter as the electronic environment around them makes
operator communication more difficult.
By Patrick Tucker Science & Technology Editor, Defense One October 10, 2024
https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/10/new-ai-powered-strike-drone-shows-how-quickly-battlefield-autonomy-evolving/400179/
Small drones have been changing modern warfare at least since 2015, when Russia
and Ukraine began to use them to great effect for rapid targeting. The latest
addition is a strike-and-intelligence quadcopter that its builder hopes will do
more things with a lot less operator attention.
The point of the Bolt-M, revealed by Anduril today, is to make fewer demands on
the operator and offer more information than, easy-to-produce first-person-view
strike drones, the type that Ukraine is producing by the hundreds of thousands.
The U.S. Army, too, is looking at FPV drones for infantry platoons. But they
require special training to use and come with a lot of operational limits.
The Bolt-M, according to an Anduril statement, works ?without requiring
specialized operators.?
The company has a contract from the U.S. Marine Corps? Organic Precision Fires
? Light, or OPF-L, program to develop a strike variant.
The Bolt-M key selling feature is its autonomy-and-AI software powered by the
Anduril Lattice platform. The operator can draw a bounding box on a battlefield
display, set a few specifications, and send the drone on its way.
Once a target is identified in Lattice, an operator can specify a standoff
position for Bolt-M to maintain, tasking the system to stalk the target from
beyond visual or acoustic detection range even as the target moves and is
occluded, the company statement said.
When it is time to strike, an operator can define the engagement angle to
ensure the most effective strike, while onboard vision and guidance algorithms
maintain terminal guidance even if connectivity is lost with the operator.
But the system is also intended to handle some reconnaissance tasks that humans
do but other small cheap strike drones do not.
In conversation with reporters on Wednesday, Anduril chief strategy officer
Chris Brose said that the Bolt-M is intended to help its operator to understand
what is happening on the battlefield, whether it is kind of known targets or
targets that are recognizable to the systems on board, or whether it's unknown
things that that operator can then select through its interaction with the
autonomous system, tell it to track, tell it to follow, eventually, if so
desired, based on the human saying ?Go,? to actually fly in and engage that
target.?
Brose said the Bolt-M might even be able to spot new variants of older weapons.
?If the Russians in this instance start modifying them and building these kinds
of turtle tanks, maybe the computer vision hasn't seen that already?it can
still surface that insight back to an operator.?
Over the next six months, the Marine Corps will put the Bolt-M?s munition
variant through ?a pretty rigorous test and evaluation campaign,? he said.
The Bolt-M pushes right up to the limits of the Pentagon principle that robotic
weapons should always have a person involved in lethal decisions.
Brose said that their efforts are guided by the company?s experiences in
Ukraine, particularly feedback from Ukranians who are face-to-face with Russian
electronic warfare. The drone can fly to GPS waypoints. But in places where GPS
is under attack, operators can manually control it?and it can maintain custody
of the target and execute previous operator-delivered commands even when links
are broken.
In many ways, the Bolt-M derives its real value, and its intelligence, from the
Lattice platform, which can integrate data from varioussensors and sources.
Anduril is working to make sure that Lattice works with a variety of drones,
even from other manufacturers, said Brose.
That could give the company a key, central role as different forces buy
different drones or make their own in the field.
?What we are doing with Lattice is to deliver as much autonomy across that
entire kill chain to put that human being on-the-loop so that they can make
better decisions faster. They can make more decisions. They can take more
actions because they have an intelligent system that's incorporating?sensor
data, platforms, vehicles,? he said.
But what decisions? The Defense Department maintains a list of AI ethical
principles that say that human beings must be able to ?exercise appropriate
levels of judgment and remain responsible for the development, deployment,
use,? over AI-enabled weapons.
Last year, the Pentagon sought to clarify what is and is not allowable?while
leaving room to adjust the rules if things change.
One of the key lessons from the Ukraine battlefield is that battlefield
conditions can move very rapidly. Different nations, allied and adversary, will
have different policies around lethal autonomy. Those other policies will
change rapidly, too, depending on what is happening on the front lines. As
attacks against the connections binding humans to drones become more effective,
the need for more capable autonomy will increase.
Brose said Anduril anticipates that U.S. policy will change, and they want to
be ready to serve the Pentagon?s new needs when it happens.
?We're not going to go out and solve for every sort of hypothetical edge case,?
he said. ?Our focus is on making the system as capable as possible based on how
we believe users want to and need to use it now and in the near future. Then,
to the extent that that gets limited or governed or restrained by policy or
rules of engagement, that is entirely the decision of the government. We want
them to have that choice, rather than realize that they would like to have a
more capable system, but, but, you know, we?re not capable of providing it to
them.?
--
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