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?
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...
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.
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.
Aside from, like, the guns 'n' stuff.
Except you know, it kills people.