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It's like WWI all over again. In WWI, people went happily off to war thinking it's going to be nice and heroic and adventurous like the good old days and they all get slaughtered in a pathetic pointless way in a blink of an eye by newly developed automated war machinery.

The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call. The part in sci-fi where anyone actually has to aim to kill an enemy was a big romantic lie. The robots don't miss and they draw and shoot before the humans even know they're there. William Gibson, to his credit, did anticipate this with the Slamhound assassin robots in Count Zero.

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> The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call

Strange. The video and everyone here keeps talking about this as a scary future dystopia, while Pakistan and many other countries have been living in it for years.

Drone strikes are exactly what the video describes: surgical precision attacks from machines with automatic weapons that the targets couldn't defend themselves from, used by both governments and terrorists, and routinely relying on mass surveillance for targeting.

The weakly conveyed message of the video was that there needs to be a human pressing the trigger so that they can appreciate whether the act conflicts with their values, but we have millennia of evidence that humans can act mindlessly too.

You don't even need robots for that. You just need an advanced scope on a rifle that can still be transported by a human, and the human is also the one that identifies targets. Check this out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0oGZ4TZr5k

Now, we're not yet at the point where it's cost-effective to give every infantryman a thing like this - the scope alone costs more than most high-end sniper rifles. But costs will go down...

I have to wonder how hard it would really be to detect and target somebody whose scope is laser-ranging and has wifi. These seem like tactical giveaways.

That's not to say this sort of technology couldn't be useful, but putting active broadcasting equipment on your gun is going to backfire in next generation warfare.

It's trivial to figure out where a ranging laser comes from, it's just that asymmetric warfare enables you to use them with impunity

You can but NODs retail now that are halfway as good as the military state-of-the-art but a tiny fraction of the price. People think the Taliban, ISIS et al are just these desert rednecks but the truth is that they are well trained (originally by US Special Forces to fight the Soviets), highly experienced - much more so than any Western soldier most of whom do only a couple of tours - well funded and technologically sophisticated enough to run advanced psyops via social media.

And we already use lasers heavily because of this. Ever noticed those square things mounted to the forends of M16 and M4 rifles in Iraq and Afghanistan? E.g. this photo from 2001 - notice how literally every guy in it has one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._Marines_humping_in_A...

That thing is called AN/PEQ-2, and it is an near infrared (NIR) laser/illuminator. The reason why it's infrared, is because the enemy can't see it unless they have night vision (which works in near infrared). The illuminator is then used as a flashlight, essentially, and the laser is used to designate targets.

Now, recently, groups like ISIS have been acquiring night vision devices in more substantial numbers. So now there's an arms race of sorts, where there are new devices like this that push the frequencies further down, such that most existing NIR devices cannot see it, but new and more expensive ones can. Presumably the same would apply to Trackpoint-like technology.

Interesting, didn't know about this 'race to thermal IR'. But what I do know is that op optical components suitable for thermal imaging systems are under export control in the EU. So at least as a corporate entity you cannot easily export them.

In US, as well. In fact, all kinds of things that have to do with both active IR, and protection against it, are regulated.

For example, there's a popular firearm (and other things, technically, but it's mostly used for firearms) coating called Cerakote. Comes in a bunch of colors, including those commonly used for camouflage - indeed, you can mix and match to create some very impressive patterns. Example:

http://i64.tinypic.com/21bw5lc.jpg

This is available to civilians, and pretty popular - mostly for aesthetics, but it does work well as a camouflage. The catch is that, being an epoxy polymer coating, it reflects NIR really well - so for someone observing through a night vision device, these things basically glow, especially if an infrared illuminator is also used.

But Cerakote also does have a version that was specifically designed to reduce the near-infrared signature to the point where it works just as well as camo in NIR, as it does in visual spectrum. Except it's only available to military and police - and I believe this is, in fact, because of some law that restricts them from offering it on civilian market.

As for the "arms race" in IR, here's one specific example:

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2017/10/12/swir-mawl-clad...

I won't discount the other utilities of NIR night vision but for the purposes of detecting incoming infantry, it's overkill.

Give me a cheap-ass webcam, a rapsberry pi 3 and a day or two to cobble together an OpenCV beam-detecting program in Python. A day or two more —perhaps with better hardware— and I'll give you GIS-aided positioning. That seems like it would be enough to defend a position.

Even at other wavelengths, the sensor equipment is out there. I'm not sure what the SNR would be like on a varied focus 0.4μm (~bluray) sensor though.

The point is that the laser will likely be infrared. And it might well be of a kind that you can't easily source sensors for.

Sorry, I'd switched to the side of the visible spectrum because a $2 webcam off ebay with its IR filter removed will pick up 830nm IR. That's what the AN/PEQ-2A uses.

CMOS sensors pick up all sorts.

The most amazing thing about the Great War is not that people started out like this, but they continued once they knew the truth.

We are very unlikely to get as wakeup call after any AI War because we will all be dead.

Maybe if something develops intelligence and tool use after us, they can do a better job with it.

> The first AI War is going to be a really brutal wakeup call.

I know. I thought I was decent at strategy games, but AI War shook that confidence to the bone. I don't think I've ever won a game. http://store.steampowered.com/app/40400/AI_War_Fleet_Command...

On a serious note, you're absolutely right. Sci-Fi has been lying to us for a very long time and I don't think people are ready to face what the reality will be.

> The robots don't miss and they draw and shoot before the humans even know they're there.

Maybe, though if those robots are based on neural networks maybe we'll luck out and get a situation like this: https://xkcd.com/1897/

To download your file: Please click all the squares containing traitorous human scum.

"Sci-Fi has been lying to us for a very long time [..]"

That's totally unfair. I think you have been reading the wrong science fiction.

it also seems that most people are too optimistic with regards to involvement of robots and ai in war. first of all an asymmetric kill power distribution will lead to asymmetric war anyway - that's what is referred to as terrorism. if an opponent has no chance fighting a 1on1 battle they will resort to planting bombs in malls. and the idea that robots Will fight for humans is also very naive because if the robots are done on one side then humans will be back fighting.

"Heroic" and "adventurous" OK, but- "nice"? I can't believe anyone ever thought that going to war -to kill and risk getting killed- could be "nice", except perhaps for murderous psychopaths.

It's a figure of speech meant to convey irony.

Grunts facing mini-drones. Helmet-penetrating explosives. Military sci-fi horror.

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