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General Intelligence
Was an Iranian Scientist Really Assassinated With an A.I. Weapon?
A.I.-assisted weapons are proliferating quickly
OneZero’s General Intelligence is a roundup of the most important artificial intelligence and facial recognition news of the week.
In late November, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated on a highway outside of Tehran.
Iranian military and state-owned news outlets blame Israel for the attack but also claim that Fakhrizadeh was killed by an A.I.-controlled machine gun mounted to a Nissan truck. A deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards described the machine gun as “equipped with an intelligent satellite system which zoomed in on martyr Fakhrizadeh.” Little other information is known.
Eyewitnesses and the scientist’s family contest claims that A.I. technology had anything to with the assassination, according to the New York Times. Instead, they say, the story of an A.I.-powered boogeyman is an attempt to save face after Iran’s failure to protect one of its top scientists.
Surprising as it may be, this internet column about A.I. research doesn’t have the inside scoop as to whether international assassins used a robot. But we can shed light on how far-fetched this claim really is based on what we know about military robots.
Unlike most of the A.I. research community, eager to post its latest work in conferences and public-facing repositories like arXiv, defense contractors are notoriously secretive about their R&D projects. In the United States, these projects can be branded as national security secrets to shield themselves from public records laws. This handy loophole is used to hide how sophisticated our military systems have become — in fact, $76 billion was spent on classified defense projects in 2020 alone.
But we do know that hundreds of autonomous military systems already exist. A 2017 report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) surveyed publicly available information to catalog 381 autonomous military systems, 175 of which were armed.
“Autonomous military system” is a vague term that encompasses everything from a self-flying drone…
