The Strangely Believable Tale of a Mythical Rogue Drone

Did you hear about the Air Force AI drone that went rogue and attacked its operators inside a simulation? The cautionary tale was told by Colonel Tucker Hamilton, chief of AI test and operations at the US Air Force, during a speech at an aerospace and defense event in London late last month. It apparently involved taking the kind of learning algorithm that has been used to train computers to play video games and board games like Chess and Go and using it to train a drone to hunt and destroy surface-to-air missiles. "At times, the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat," Hamilton was widely reported as telling the audience in London. It sounds like just the sort of thing AI experts have begun warning that increasingly clever and maverick algorithms might do.