Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war
economist.com
economist.com
Or launching nuclear weapons based on the advice of AI (or allowing AI to control them altogether). All out nuclear war has so far been avoided multiple times, because of an actual human making a split second decision at the right moment.
Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is, "tripped on shoe laces while scoring +10 on the sosh meeds".
Because if that’s what we did then no need to worry about getting back to the Stone Age, we would have never left it anyway... Man’s ability to dream, imagine and explore the unknown both physically and intellectually is what got us where we are.
The language used here isn't speculation, it's absolute. If the author was to prefix the statement using speculative terms then I wouldn't have said a thing.
The remark came across as highly negative, unsubstantiated and not useful so I called it out.
Edit: Downvotes? You're going to have to do better than that before I change my mind.
Probably because it was.
It was also a reply to a comment about a hypothetical future, which sort of implies speculation for all child comments.
And how can something be absolutely embarrassing? What is and is not embarrassing is an opinion. How would someone word that in a way that fits your requirements?
We don't understand edge cases of AI much at all, and the terrain-space of "possible minds" they might be is vastly broader than that of a human mind, and utterly outside our experience.
An AI might work with absolute 100% flawless precision for 100 years, then decided one day to kill everyone. A lot harder to see that coming from a totally alien intelligence than a human one. AI does not think like humans, have human values, or care about what humans care about, that might make them extremely unpredictable and dangerous.
There will be no time for iterative development, or learning from our mistakes, a sufficiently advanced AI knows we would try to stop it, and make sure that we never can.
Can't unexplode a bomb, for sure.
Why do people say things like this? They aren't. There is still a human-in-the-loop for all systems I'm aware of.
The problems with nukes are that (a) the command and control systems can't reliably prevent one or a small number of people from going from going rogue or (b) the 'human' in the loop has to make a quick decision whether to launch based on potentially crappy inputs.
The latter case has happened enough in the past that it should be pretty clear it's a serious problem. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls for a list.
That's the crazy thing about hypersonic nuclear weapons... A bomb going from Russia to America in under 5 minutes, who else is going to decide than an algorithm... Knowing world peace is partly ensured by mutually assured destruction :s
(To be clear, I'm for a moratorium on hypersonic nuclear warfare, for sure.)
> By May of 1986, these binders had evolved into a catalogue of 292 indicators of “signs of tension.” - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/forecasting-nuclear...
I'm not sure how much was computerized but it basically took a bunch of signals and fed them into an algorithm to tell if the US was about to nuke them.
Modern technology also allows us to be faster, cheaper, safer and more accurate, things that everyone wants from militaries worldwide. The goal of automation/optimization is as few and short of engagements as possible.
The only thing better than no war is a short one.
I think all wars are tragic and am not sure that I agree dropping the nukes was a good idea (I’m a US Army combat vet or OIF II btw), but this comment seems eerily familiar.
"The New York Times reported at the time, "Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the B-29's of the entire Marianas area, declared that if the war is shortened by a single day, the attack will have served its purpose." This view was later echoed by Japan's former Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who said, "The determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing.""
War is hell, as you saw first hand, and those of us who are charged to execute it want it to end as quickly as possible.
But I suppose Maj. Gen. LeMay would have prefered killing yet additionals hundreds of thousand civilians if it could mean saving the life of one American soldier.
Just different perspectives I guess.
Grand strategy involves decisions for the welfare of societies for a century into the future.
You have no idea what you're talking about do you?
> The goal of automation/optimization is as few and short of engagements as possible. The only thing better than no war is a short one.
Like afganistan, the longest us war ever with no forseeable end in sight, those kind of short engagements?
The problem with this is that the more arms control we have, the more the benefits of one party cheating.
This is the stuff that terrifies me. It's a mistake to think we'll never find ourselves in the middle of a warzone just because we live in a rich country.
The reason I find the modern version of this as adequate condemnation of our species is several fold.
1) We profess a belief in human rights that goes back to our most basic education. Most people in the West are indoctrinated with the values of human rights.
2) We worship at the alter of those rights. We hold up MLK and Lincoln (deserved or not) as our greatest citizens because of what they did for individual liberty.
3) We acknowledge injustice. Every one of us is made aware of the horrors of the colonial period, the Holocaust and the gulag.
Even the most ignorant among us is educated of the moral duties and the ethical possibilities of our world. And yet, we choose to do nothing when our own violate the values of our mythos.
The ignorance that can be said to cloak the violence of our forbearers cannot cloak our own for we do not posses it.
We talk like that. But it's just talk. It is clear from our behavior that this is not the case.
I'd love to believe that it is just due to ignorance. Sometimes it is, but I fear that we're running on tribal programming and that's not going to change in a hurry.
In the past, the concious or wordy parts of our brain didn't exactly contain the moral philosophy we have now which is supposed to counter our basic cruelty.
We have hundreds of years of it. We call the enlightenment foundational to our governments and ethics. Many people hold the Bill of Rights sacred like a religious text. We have the most extreme examples of human cruelty to heed as examples. Anyone may read about them, most American school children are required to learn about them.
But even that knowledge, that programming is not capable of overcoming our basic tendency toward violence and cruelty. Maybe, there are some behaviors the wordy part of the brain just can't reason us out of.
I hope I'm wrong. Maybe there's an even better set of ideas than the enlightenment, humanism, and human rights that will be more contagious and more powerful to overwhelm our basic nature. Perhaps those ideas are already out there in some culture being drowned out by the hegemony of Western moral philosophy. IDK.