For some reason, we can’t justify more on civilian research but the military easily can, if it embraces it as part of its future.
- If you don't, then the enemy will
- If you do, then you're inviting the enemy to do the same
So, without trust and mutual agreement on an international level, this is a self-propelling premise that cannot be stopped.
Game theory 101.
Some might ask the same question in the context of human children.
They may give troops on the front line some leeway, but within parameters for pursuit of a goal.
I don't think Defence wants "uncontrolled" anything. Even if they manage to develop fully cognizant AI they will want to know the exact parameters it can work within.
Of course, humans make errors...
Aside from, like, the guns 'n' stuff.
Nothing to worry about, move along.
I think recent events have clearly demonstrated that biological weapons are much much cheaper.
create a killer virus
inoculate your people
release it at the rest of the world
profit?
So if it gains autonomy there is high chance of it destroying everything else before dying itself.
I found the story of Horizon Zero dawn highly plausible. The main takeaway - dumb military AIs destroy all the living things. The only bit we are missing is fully automated fabrication.
Supply chains for high tech goods such as AI-powered autonomous fighter jets are extremely complex. We've already automated some of the individual steps, and will surely in the coming decades automate many more. But high-level orchestration of the chains as a whole, that requires many human-level intelligences to cooperate in advanced social systems, I don't think anything short of general AI could replace that.
Not only what we are missing is self replication but everything else including the important part and what was the problem “converting bio-mass into energy” without that it wouldn’t be an issue, not to mention that HZD makes little sense in general even with the coverup nukes exist and they blow up shit just fine their lore made little sense in the long run as they couldn’t replicate they just had really big robots the octopus ones that could manufacture more of the smaller ones.
And more importantly since the biomass conversion was basically nano machines why couldn’t you produce a swarm of them that simply eats robots? Or why couldn’t you produce a swarm of robots to fight the rogue swarm.
The whole “unhackable” thing also doesn’t makes sense and if they were then well make another swarm that just is unhackable and let them duke it out. The technology and more importantly the consistency of the technology in that universe makes absolutely no sense.
As much as I liked the game the story while cool was about as plausible as an alien invasion that triggers a zombie apocalypse followed by the second coming.
Except you know, it kills people.
Yea, and the game is life and death. A military minded AI won't distinguish between surrendering and fighting enemies, won't distinguish between enemies and non-combatents, might confuse a shutdown order with an electronic attack. Just cause AI isn't by definition "smart" doesn't mean its harmless.
"mostly" still leaves a lot of room for bad actors, but these sorts of compromises have worked surprisingly well enough that the failures were notable. Political problems are only going to have political solutions, and almost by definition those are imperfect.
Frankly, we shouldn't be developing AI outside of institutions with STRONG ties to humanist missions (possibly including religion). AI is not for war, and it's not for "efficient" resource extraction and development; it's for helping humanity to safeguard itself and its potential.
It has completely failed to keep nuclear weapons in check, imo.
Keeping AI technology out of existence has the same problem as keeping nuclear weapons out of existence - the incentives are too great for any nation to have them.
If a nation is armed with nuclear weapons, the only possible check on them is another nation that is armed with nuclear weapons. Thus even in the existing non-proliferation framework, the largest nations (the United States, Russia, China, several European powers) ALL still have nuclear weapons. The reason why is that if any nation was the only nuclear armed nation it would be impossible to defeat with any quantity of conventional force.
The same argument applies for AI. It would be impossible avoid the existence of militarized AI if it provides the same level of force multiplication as nuclear weapons. It would be necessary for any nation to try to gain the same technology as a deterrent against attack by a rival that possesses the technology.
Really debatable. Bribe enemy generals, drop commando paratroopers right on top of enemy's political leadership, even at 90% attrition rates, bomb vital military infrastructure, like strategic stockpiles, to demoralise the enemy (making them understand that the war will be long, hungry, and ugly,) even if it means sacrificing the entirety of your airforce, and wait until your land force finally reaches enemy territory amid this complete chaos.
It seems like if what you are arguing is possible, nukes don’t need to be invoked at all. Why wouldn’t you use the same technique against a conventional enemy, if it is possible at all?
There are exactly 0 countries on record who went on offensive against nuclear states, with intention to invade them.
To execute a strategy like this, one needs to be quite a monster to rationalise such losses in their sane mind.
It is as ruthless to your own soldiers, as it is to the enemy: forcing a stronger enemy into the most ugly, meat grinding form of ground war, with exact intention to exact maximum attrition losses, while negating advantages of high tech weaponry. Sending them a message "All your bombers, and missiles are useless at the bayonet range, you will have to bury us with your bodies"
Even Mao only sent covert cues to Soviets that he is ready to repeat Zhenbaotai, but even he had no real intention to follow up on them. That was a pure theatre.
It is insane to go to war against a nuclear armed opponent. Sure, you could kill half your able bodied population of military age and maybe win (what if something goes wrong in your battle plan? Now you're nuked and the opponent is still combat ready), but now any of your neighbors can easily take advantage of your now devastated country.
You can't bomb much of vital military infrastructure if your own infrastructure - not only airfields, but also population centres - have been nuked. Your bombers can drop a single full payload, after which they will have no bases left where they can return to reload. I mean, we have Cold War studies of all of that - the only way to ensure that bombers really have the ability to bomb enemy infrastructure was to ensure that they are up in the air patrolling, or alternatively scramble to launch within minutes of an alert, since an hour after the start of WW3 you only have a single strike with the airforce that you have in the air.
You can't demoralise the enemy by "making them understand that the war will be long, hungry, and ugly" because the war will end in a single day, after which half of your population will be dead, and the other half in need of food, electricity and supplies. Sure, you will have people willing and able to defend the country, but nobody will be invading; but after being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike your ability to deploy and supply a massed overseas invasion is destroyed, so you're not a meaningful threat anymore, the conflict is over.
Nuclear deterrent is the ultimate defensive weapon because it ensures that any war is unwinnable for the attacker - if the attack fails, then it fails, but if the attack succeeds, there's no good response to an ultimatum to accept ceasefire or have your cities nuked. All your soldiers and commanders know that if they invade and win, then their families and their homeland will die anyway.
And I read much of them, and what I wrote above is a restatement of what I read.
> Your bombers can drop a single full payload, after which they will have no bases left where they can return to reload.
Yes, but even this will likely be enough to bomb biggest C3 centres, bases, stockpiles of food, ammo, and fuel. Just enough to ensure 1.) initial shock, and C3 paralysis, 2.) making sure that the adversary will be running on the leased time too.
Even at the height of cold war, each side had at most 10 strategic level stockpiles. Without them, the huge force would've ran out of supplies from regional bases in under 6 month.
> after being on the receiving end of a nuclear strike your ability to deploy and supply a massed overseas invasion is destroyed,
If you have your entire tank, and mechanised force on the go, and one leg on foreign soil already. It doesn't matter. The enemy will either have to nuke own cities captured by your force, or contest them with conventional force. Similarly, they will have to either set their equally diminished supplier on fire to deny them to invader, or have to contest them.
> All your soldiers and commanders know that if they invade and win, then their families and their homeland will die anyway.
Yes, it requires one to be a madman to accept such "victory." Especially if you already are a somehow major power, as you know that in today's free-for-all world, a third power will swoop in to claim spoils in no time. But think of it as a "counter-MAD," or "asymmetric MAD," or "madman's MAD"
Genetic engineering on humans.
Politically there is a ban. But given your "not perfect enforcement" and 2000 billionaires I guess at least one of them has this goal - whether it is considered kooky or not. Someone is trying to engineer their offspring for intelligence/looks/health.
Whether they achieve it remains to be seen and will no doubt come out in history.
The first is done largely by the great powers agreeing that it's a bad idea from a military standpoint. That is, biological weapons are not stockpiled not because of all the obvious horrible consequences, but because the common wisdom is that they are ineffective weapons.
Keeping nuclear programs in check is mostly done through expense. Everyone who has them has made enough of them to feel safe, and doesn't want to make more because they are really expensive. After states have decided they don't want any more nukes, they sign agreements with each other to make sure no-one else is building a massive stockpile. If any of them wanted a larger stockpile, they would make it.
In general, powerful states can not be limited by agreements. They only ever work as a framework that allows everyone to do what they would have wanted to do anyway, while feeling confident of what everyone else wants to do and how to plan for it. The American obsession of thinking of the UN as world government and international agreements as laws really distorts your view on the world. That is simply not how any of this works.
But regardless of all that, even if broad international agreements would actually work to limit weaponry, it still wouldn't work, because AI is deniable. The initial AI isn't going to replace the pilot, they are going to augment them. And those are developed further until the pilots are no longer needed, and past that. So you can develop all the way to the point where humans have become a detriment, without needing to show your hand. And only deploy completely unmanned platforms once the proverbial shit hits the fan, which is after the point where everyone has stopped caring about international agreements anyway.
Can you point to any evidence that this is the case? It doesn't sound plausible to me.
This is about chemical weapons but a lot of it applies to biological as well. Biological weapons also have the added benefit of possibly becoming a global pandemic and infecting your own military and economic base.
I don't know if it's because of Trump, but as far as I can tell Americans don't think of the UN at all anymore.
At all. There have been so many recent events where the UN could have been involved, but wasn't.
E.g. when the USA recently smoked General Soleimani with Hellfire missles, where was the UN?
I watch local and network evening news on a regular basis, but didn't hear anything about this being discussed in the UN.
Perhaps it was debated, but it went unnoticed by about 99% of the US population.
This is a good example of the weird attitude where Americans think of the UN as a world government.
UN is a place where diplomats of different countries keep constantly in touch and maintain relations. That's all it is. UN does not have opinions. The member countries have, UN is only a place where they are presented. UN does not do things. The member countries do things, UN is the place where this is organized.
It amuses me to think that Aperture Science had a protocol for rogue AIs with the codename "Birthday Cake". GLaDOS did not understand why all of the humans kept talking about cake as they died. They really seem to like cake...
Consider the US Air-force is unquestionably the #1 most powerful Air-force in the world with the US Navy comfortably holding the #2. That’s frankly expensive.
Unfortunately, many NATO countries are currently spending far less than 2% (as you showed above)... and the US is spending far more than 2%, in part, to make up for the shortfall (ie, why we have tens of thousands of troops stationed in Europe, etc).
[1]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/03/if-russia-started-a-war...
Any nation in history will lose a single battle if their enemies concentrate on a single point and their defending a huge area. However, such a loss represents no significant reduction in fighting forces and is therefore not militarily meaningful. Further a massive defensive concentration of forces into a small area just means the actual attack takes place somewhere else.
In the end winning requires armies to face armies or supplies to run out over long periods.
That's a major change. During the Cold War, absent tactical nukes, NATO loses continental Europe to the Warsaw Pact.
You dont need to be a direct military competitor, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that you can still defeat US with a thousand cuts.
George Bush in 2003 had the Mission Accomplished banner, if the mission was accomplished, what are US soldiers still doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Which means the US had to do all the expensive logistics work too.
At the expense of US soldiers dying from the hands of AL Qaeda/ISIS and wasting trillions of dollars which could have been used to rebuild US infra and providing healthcare and other services to US citizens.
Didn't the US lose by that definition?
No one is saying US does not have that monopoly, its just that US still loses with that monopoly.
You could just as well double the EU's relative share by halving the US military budget. The US would still spend more than China, Russia, and a bunch of other countries combined. Surely that's more than enough.
It's just that US politicians always frame it as if the total spending had.to remain constant.
Navy said, great, let's turn it into a tanker!
Northrop said nope but Boeing said they'd be happy to. So billions as long as those robots stay in their lane.
Then in 1969-73, Senate majority leader Mansfield decided that this research might be being misused to fund science in ways that wasn't directly useful to fighting Soviets, so ARPA became DARPA (the D is for Defense!) and now researchers needed to explain why their science might help build missiles.
Which is prima facie untrue. While there are benefits to basic research over the long term, it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today. Those sorts of timeframes aren't that useful for a military expecting a conflict in the next few years.
Only if you have little knowledge of military.
> it took roughly 60 years from the discovery of the laser to the beginnings of deployable laser weaponry today.
But it took less than a year for it to be used by the CIA and FBI for spying (an interferometer was one of the first applications) and not much longer for it to be used for range finding and targeting for the military and not much longer than that to be used to determine mass of objects.
The directed energy weapon you are referring to isn't the only application that the military, CIA, FBI, and other agencies have for lasers. There are hundreds more than what I mentioned and a dozen of which were in practical use within the first 5 years of its discovery.
Just because you aren't aware of the uses of such technology doesn't mean that they aren't used and doesn't mean they aren't __HIGHLY__ valuable assets. We could go on and include things like nightvision, underwater communications (other types of communications as well), guidance, or defensive applications but I think it is pretty clear that the laser is one of the _best_ examples of technology being used (and quickly adopted) by military/government, not worst.
That said, DARPA has always been one of the biggest funders of research in the US, whether it's basic research or applied. Just think of the DARPA Grand Challenge (self-driving cars in an off-road setting). While, yes, ultimately their goal is military application, this cultivation of research into self-driving cars is something that will benefit everybody, not just the military.
The reason to invest in civilian research while in times of peace is that you want products to go into the public domain and be mass produced. This means that the new fighters you can make are much cheaper to produce and can have much more advanced weapon capabilities. The only real difference between civilian and military research is if the knowledge gets into the public domain or not (with the exception for weapons, which is more niche than you'd expect). This is why DARPA does that funding, but it isn't just DARPA. The entire SBIR/STTR program exists to get companies to bootstrap themselves and mass produce things the government needs (yes, it is abused quite a bit). Many contracts exist for this reason too.
The last aspect is economic and cultural. If your country is doing well economically it is often able to avoid war in the first place. Rich countries often don't fight with soldiers and jets, they fight with computers and resources. Why invade a country when you can put economic shackles on it? China and the US are both doing this. The other part is cultural exportation. If your country is producing all the widgets that another country likes and enjoys then their people are not eager to fight you (as long as you're not being aggressive towards them).
All these, and more matter. War is much more than bullets and fighter jets.
This is __NOT__ what I claimed.
It goes both ways, and military applications create market pressures and timescales that wouldn't normally exist. Take for example, sustained fission, computing, or the semiconductor industry as a whole (which was subsidized by the government in its early years for aerospace applications, some civilian and some not).
But that said it's more about industrial capacity than research. We build planes and tanks not because we need them today, but because we might need the ability to build them tomorrow. Continued research on military applications prevents institutional knowledge from dying and tools from rotting.
>> They complement one another too.
>> One helps the other. The reverse direction is slower though because it is often held close to the vest for a bit of time.
Glad we agree
> We build planes and tanks not because we need them today, but because we might need the ability to build them tomorrow.
I also agree. I'm not sure why people think I am saying to not build tanks and planes during peace time. I just think we should be funding civilian science more and that the military benefits from such research. I haven't really disagreed with all these people "disagreeing" with me.