Three Ukrainian civilians were slaughtered by Russian drones that were guided by artificial intelligence, marking an ominous escalation in warfare’s robotic age.
Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others were blown to bits last month at a gas station in the city of Zaporizhzhia by a drone outfitted with an experimental artificial intelligence system that decides, without a human operator, where to strike, the New York Times reported.
The drone, which looked like a model airplane, was programmed to fly towards the gas station, but once it closed in, an AI system autonomously chose its target — most likely propane tanks — based on its training to recognize such objects, experts and military officials told the paper.
“This is a risk for the whole world,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of Ukrainian air defenses in Zaporizhzhia.
“In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”
Debris recovered from the gas station and other strike sites around the city revealed that the drones were running on Nvidia minicomputers that determined where the drone would detonate, officials and experts said.
Nvidia produces the majority of the chips powering the world’s most advanced AI systems and confirmed that the module found in the drone was a Jetson Orin minicomputer, a low-cost system that has been found on other Russian weapons, according to The Times.
Nvidia described the system as a consumer-grade product available for students, developers and start-ups “for a wide range of beneficial applications.”
Nvidia sells the computer in several countries but not in Russia — although it’s widely available through resellers.
The July 6 gas station attack would be the first documented case in which self-targeting AI Russian drones caused civilian deaths, per Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The presence of an Nvidia module “is the best proof” that Russia has been experimenting with autonomous AI on the battlefield, she said.
