Killer AI is on the minds of US Air Force leaders. An Air Force colonel who oversees AI testing used what he now says is a hypothetical to describe a military AI going rogue and killing its human operator in a simulation in a presentation at a professional conference. But after reports of the talk emerged Thursday, the colonel said that he misspoke and that the “simulation” he described was a “thought experiment” that never happened. Speaking at a conference last week in London, Col. Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton, head of the US Air Force’s AI Test and Operations, warned that AI-enabled technology can behave in unpredictable and dangerous ways, according to a summary posted by the Royal Aeronautical Society, which hosted the summit. As an example, he described a simulation where an AI-enabled drone would be programmed to identify an enemy’s surface-to-air missiles (SAM). A human was then supposed to sign off on any strikes.

Full story : Air Force colonel backtracks over his warning about how AI could go rogue and kill its human operators.