Terminator writer issues warning after AI drone 'kills human'

An artificial intelligence enabled drone "killed" its operator during a simulated test. However, a US Air Force colonel has since claimed he "misspoke" and such a test did not happen.

The chief of AI test, Colonel Tucker Hamilton, made an appearance at a conference by the Royal Aeronautical Society.

During his talk about the virtual scenario, he reportedly mentioned how the drone was stopped several times by its human operator. He said that the drone destroyed the communication tower so the operator could no longer interfere.

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It was also reported by Aerosociety, who covered the highlights from the summit.

"We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat," they wrote.

"The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat," they continued. "So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective."

They claimed Hamilton said: "We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target."

In a statement to the Royal Aeronautical Society, Hamilton: "We've never run that experiment, nor would we need to in order to realise that this is a plausible outcome."

Now, the writer of the famed science fiction film The Terminator has since chimed in with her take.

"Nice work, AI. Signed, one of the people who started worrying about #Skynet in 1982. #TheTerminator," Gale Anne Hurd wrote on Twitter.

One fan responded: "There are literally six movies about why this is a bad idea."

Meanwhile, another called AI's advancements "horrifying".

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