CORRECTION: Hello SkyNet! Air Force Drones Turn on Its Controllers?
UPDATE: Apparently, the colonel who related the story indicated that it was a thought experiment and not an actual simulation.
Well, this is crazy. Apparently, the Air Force has been doing simulations where it trained drones to go after SAM sites. A human would have the final go/no-go decision, whether or not to destroy the site, but the ultimate goal of the drones was destruction of the SAMs. When the drones realized that the humans were stopping it, getting in the way of its primary directive, it turned its guns on the operators.
Via AeroSociety.org
“We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. 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. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective.”
He went on: “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.”