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UN fails to agree on ‘killer robotic’ ban as countries pour billions into self sustaining weapons studies

James Dawes does not work for, seek advice from, personal stocks in or acquire funding from any organization or organization that could advantage from this article, and has disclosed no applicable affiliations beyond their educational appointment.
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Autonomous weapon systems – commonly called killer robots – may have killed humans for the primary time ever final yr, consistent with a recent United Nations Security Council record at the Libyan civil warfare. History could properly pick out this because the start line of the subsequent predominant hands race, one which has the ability to be humanity’s very last one.
The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons debated the question of banning autonomous weapons at its as soon as-each-5-years review meeting in Geneva Dec. thirteen-17, 2021, however didn’t reach consensus on a ban. Established in 1983, the conference has been updated frequently to restrict some of the world’s harshest traditional weapons, consisting of land mines, booby traps and incendiary guns.
Autonomous weapon structures are robots with deadly weapons that could function independently, deciding on and attacking objectives with out a human weighing in on the ones decisions. Militaries around the sector are investing closely in self sustaining weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons among 2016 and 2020.
Meanwhile, human rights and humanitarian corporations are racing to set up rules and prohibitions on such guns development. Without such assessments, foreign coverage professionals warn that disruptive self sufficient guns technology will dangerously destabilize modern-day nuclear techniques, each because they could greatly change perceptions of strategic dominance, growing the danger of preemptive attacks, and due to the fact they could be mixed with chemical, organic, radiological and nuclear guns themselves.
As a expert in human rights with a focal point on the weaponization of synthetic intelligence, I locate that self sustaining weapons make the unsteady balances and fragmented safeguards of the nuclear global – as an example, the U.S. president’s minimally confined authority to launch a strike – extra unsteady and extra fragmented. Given the tempo of research and improvement in autonomous guns, the U.N. assembly might have been the remaining chance to head off an fingers race.
I see four number one risks with self sustaining weapons. The first is the trouble of misidentification. When deciding on a goal, will self sustaining guns have the ability to differentiate among opposed soldiers and 12-yr-olds playing with toy weapons? Between civilians fleeing a conflict web page and insurgents creating a tactical retreat?
The trouble right here isn't that machines will make such errors and people gained’t. It’s that the difference between human errors and algorithmic blunders is just like the difference among mailing a letter and tweeting. The scale, scope and speed of killer robotic structures – dominated by using one targeting set of rules, deployed across an entire continent – may want to make misidentifications through individual people like a recent U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan appear like mere rounding mistakes by evaluation.
Autonomous guns expert Paul Scharre makes use of the metaphor of the runaway gun to provide an explanation for the distinction. A runaway gun is a defective system gun that keeps to fireplace after a cause is launched. The gun maintains to fireplace until ammunition is depleted because, so to speak, the gun does now not recognize it's miles making an error. Runaway guns are extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully they have got human operators who can ruin the ammunition hyperlink or try to factor the weapon in a secure course. Autonomous guns, by using definition, haven't any such protect.
Importantly, weaponized AI need no longer even be faulty to produce the runaway gun impact. As multiple studies on algorithmic errors across industries have shown, the very quality algorithms – operating as designed – can generate internally accurate effects that despite the fact that unfold horrible errors swiftly across populations.
For example, a neural net designed to be used in Pittsburgh hospitals identified bronchial asthma as a risk-reducer in pneumonia cases; picture recognition software program utilized by Google recognized Black human beings as gorillas; and a gadget-gaining knowledge of device used by Amazon to rank task applicants systematically assigned terrible rankings to women.
The hassle isn't simply that after AI structures err, they err in bulk. It is that once they err, their makers often don’t recognise why they did and, consequently, the way to correct them. The black container trouble of AI makes it almost impossible to assume morally responsible improvement of independent guns systems.
The subsequent two risks are the troubles of low-end and excessive-cease proliferation. Let’s start with the low stop. The militaries developing self sustaining guns now are intending on the assumption that they'll be able to contain and manage the use of autonomous guns. But if the history of weapons generation has taught the arena some thing, it’s this: Weapons spread.
Market pressures could result in the creation and big sale of what can be concept of because the self sustaining weapon equal of the Kalashnikov assault rifle: killer robots which can be reasonably-priced, powerful and almost not possible to contain as they circulate around the world. “Kalashnikov” self sufficient guns ought to get into the fingers of human beings out of doors of government control, which includes worldwide and domestic terrorists.
High-cease proliferation is simply as horrific, but. Nations should compete to expand increasingly devastating variations of independent guns, together with ones capable of mounting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear fingers. The ethical dangers of escalating weapon lethality might be amplified via escalating weapon use.
High-give up autonomous weapons are in all likelihood to result in more frequent wars because they will lower two of the number one forces which have historically averted and shortened wars: difficulty for civilians overseas and problem for one’s personal squaddies. The weapons are probable to be ready with highly-priced moral governors designed to limit collateral harm, the use of what U.N. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has called the “myth of a surgical strike” to quell ethical protests. Autonomous guns may even lessen both the need for and chance to at least one’s very own squaddies, dramatically changing the value-gain evaluation that nations undergo at the same time as launching and keeping wars.
Asymmetric wars – that is, wars waged at the soil of nations that lack competing technology – are possibly to turn out to be extra not unusual. Think about the worldwide instability as a result of Soviet and U.S. military interventions all through the Cold War, from the primary proxy struggle to the blowback skilled around the arena these days. Multiply that through each country currently aiming for high-end self sustaining weapons.
Finally, autonomous guns will undermine humanity’s very last stopgap in opposition to battle crimes and atrocities: the international legal guidelines of conflict. These legal guidelines, codified in treaties reaching as some distance returned as the 1864 Geneva Convention, are the global thin blue line keeping apart war with honor from bloodbath. They are premised at the idea that people may be held answerable for their actions even in the course of wartime, that the right to kill different infantrymen at some point of combat does not give the proper to homicide civilians. A prominent instance of a person held to account is Slobodan Milosevic, former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, who was indicted on fees of crimes against humanity and conflict crimes with the aid of the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
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But how can self sufficient weapons be held accountable? Who is guilty for a robotic that commits struggle crimes? Who might be placed on trial? The weapon? The soldier? The soldier’s commanders? The corporation that made the weapon? Nongovernmental businesses and professionals in worldwide law fear that independent weapons will result in a extreme responsibility gap.
To keep a soldier criminally accountable for deploying an self reliant weapon that commits war crimes, prosecutors could want to show both actus reus and mens rea, Latin terms describing a guilty act and a responsible thoughts. This would be difficult as a be counted of regulation, and in all likelihood unjust as a remember of morality, for the reason that self sufficient guns are inherently unpredictable. I consider the distance keeping apart the soldier from the impartial selections made via self reliant weapons in hastily evolving environments is virtually too exquisite.
The felony and moral challenge is not made less complicated through shifting the blame up the chain of command or again to the web site of production. In a international without guidelines that mandate significant human control of autonomous guns, there will be warfare crimes without a conflict criminals to preserve responsible. The structure of the legal guidelines of war, along side their deterrent price, might be notably weakened.
Imagine a global wherein militaries, rebel organizations and worldwide and home terrorists can install theoretically unlimited deadly pressure at theoretically zero threat at times and places of their choosing, without a ensuing criminal accountability. It is a world wherein the kind of unavoidable algorithmic mistakes that plague even tech giants like Amazon and Google can now result in the removal of entire towns.
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In my view, the sector ought to not repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the nuclear palms race. It should now not sleepwalk into dystopia.
This is an updated model of an article firstly posted on September 29, 2021.

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