Vision-based AI drones outfly world-class human pilots

Interesting but puzzling at the same time.

I don't disagree modern wars will result in whole classes of equipment being found obsolete or not cost effective, but this strikes me as odd:

[quote from the article]

> "The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune."

Well, none of those types of missiles are fundamentally new, and have existed in one way or another for decades (e.g. the HMS Sheffield was sunk by an Exocet anti-ship missile during the Falklands War in 1982!). More importantly, they work because the Ukrainians are fighting a war of resistance against an invading force; were they to go on the offensive (hypothetical, imagine they -- like the Soviet Union in WWII -- were to advance into Moscow and decapitate its leadership) they would need tanks, and airplanes, and other allegedly "obsolete" equipment.

The Ukrainian defense works where they are given support and weapons by foreign powers and because of a Russian mismanaged offensive.

Say -- again for the sake of argument -- the invasion was a coordinated effort by NATO against an hypothetical Ukrainian rogue state. How long would they last with their Stingers and Neptune anti-ship missiles?

As a devil's advocate against my own argument, Afghanistan ended up "defeating" the US in the very long run, for reasons not directly related to the weapons they used. And what weapons did they use, anyway? (Good old) Stinger, RPGs and AKs? No Neptunes in sight.

> The economies are too intertwined for either US or China to deploy their forces full-scale.

This was was a common belief about Europe before World War One. Unfortunately, that didn't prevent the carnage.

I tend to agree with you about the existential danger of full-scale confrontation. And to be fair, your concerns about these weapon systems are well founded. These things are really dangerous and we need to think very carefully about how they're developed and deployed.

But as we see in Ukraine, there's a lot of scope for limited confrontation. In this case we'll want access to deadlier weapons than our enemies have access to.

To those of us that believe in liberal democracy, this isn't just about one team vs another. This really is about living in a world where freedom is the norm rather than living in fear of an autocrat.

As they should, with 8 billions inhabitants, assuming that peace can be kept on good intentions is the pacifist fallacy. We just got a wonderful example with the invasion of Ukraine. You can be nice, you can play nice, you can apply sanctions, send strongly worded statement, and yet Ukrainians are dying and tanks are still rolling in.

You know what's stopping the Russians? Javelins and Bayraktars.

Yes I know. Basic game theory comes to mind.

But if you have closely observed China, you know that it is not some private hacker arguing in favor of development of AI drones in some private forum.

It is some Harvard/Stanford/Peking/Tsinghua educated scientific policy advisor deep inside the army/government doing this job.

I don't think there is a moral debate about developing autonomous military drones in China.

These self-restrictions based on morality regarding the development of military drones is really something only some western nations do. Other countries, if they reach the capabilites to develop them, they just do.

The reason both sides are correct in their conclusion is precisely because there is a "Chinese version of hacker news"

I'd argue that negative aspects of the world are inevitable in competitive environments given survival instincs humans have. The fact is, a lot of things really are zero-sum, like land (e.g. Russia and Ukraine)--there's only so much of it the way we take ownership of it.

Ultimately this sort of environment leads to competition over resources vs collaboration between humans. So long as environments are competitive and people want to survive, the rest emerges inevitably I think.

I always found modern conflicts interesting because humans basically formed societies to reduce competition and dangers, to help their odds. We can now take turns taking watch at night and I sleep most days vs living as a nomand I'm always in danger for my life and resources. We then moved from hunter gathers to agrarian societies because it provided even more security and stability, we didn't have to compete for food we could contribute, grow it, and share it. We formed towns, built houses. We worked together.

Then somewhere along the line we decided to reintroduce survival dynamics abstractly in these safer societies. We reduced your food security and livelihood security based on valuations of your contribution to society, we add power dynamics and authorities of control, created the idea of private property rights, we setup market places where people compete abstractly through wealth transfers in the forms of money, then we tied things back securities like food and housing to these things.

Maybe we got bored and many want to be in a threatened survival state. I'd like to think we, as a species, could toss the people obsessed with accumulating wealth and power to the curb and try stripping away many layers of abstract competition we created and look at creating layers of collaboration. It doesn't need to be another failed attempt at socialism, but it seems like we can at least be far less competitive to one another and still grow.

This is the tragedy of the commons. Its solution is a central authority. How do we get there?

What if there is an easy and painfully trivial answer to achieve world peace and avoid wars?

Imagine you are one of a million people on this planet who know the secret. Everyone else won't believe you because it is too simple and hence very easy to abuse in the other direction. What if it was as simple as flicking a switch and just doing it?

Here is the problem. If it just about flicking a switch, how to make sure people don't switch it from utopia back to dystopia?

Your utopia needs to be a self preserving system even in the face of violence. A pacifist system that isn't self preserving will be destroyed and taken over by non pacifist systems that are self preserving at least in the short run.

A democracy needs the backing of a military force to keep it alive. If there is something better than democracy then it will also need a military to protect itself.

The invasion of Ukraine has shown precisely the opposite: playing military games gets youe neighbours antsy, and an antsy empire just invades to calm its nerves.

If Ukraine hadn't been slowly de facto integrating into NATO (NATO weapons, NATO training, and even joint military exercises with NATO, on Ukrainian soil), it would have been much harder for Putin to justify the extreme costs this invasion is having on his economy.

> We've been pretty successful in stopping major nation states from using bioweapons so far.

I am sure everyone has it. Every major nations. Although they might not use it.

> AI

I am sure it is already there. Many have it. Turkey, and at least China. Maybe Israel and the US.

And it will not come in clear paradigms, I think. Like FSD in Tesla. Use will happen for components first, then major things, then maybe one day, fully autonomous.

How do you even regulize it? What happens if they use Logistic Regression? That's just Stat, right? What if add one more layer? Then that becomes MLP, and in the AI domain. What about CNNs? Transformers? Where do you draw the line?

What if the missile truck uses something like FSD?

> arms race

This isn't going to be like other arms races. This will fundamentally change all weapons. And should not be used where it is not needed, though.

Also, gone are the days when countries flaunted big missiles. How would even other countries know, if you don't want them to?

It's just autonomous technology in general. Making an autonomously-operable object destructive is the easy bit. Widespread use is a lot closer and easier than people realize, but I'd rather not spell out why that is.

>We've been pretty successful in stopping major nation states from using bioweapons so far.

Name a major state that has experienced existential war since their invention. Same for nukes.

"We've been successful in stopping" - there has been no "we" doing any "stopping". There have only been "others" "choosing not to". There would reasonably be some point of conflict where the decision falls the other way.

Major nation states do not use weapons of mass destruction against each other out of fear or retaliation. If you do not want your any to use autonomous drones against you, the best deterrent is to build some on your own.

Since when has google been making slaughterbots?

Or do you mean those dogs they were building for the military?

This same logic could be used to justify any atrocity. What exactly makes you so sure China is developing such dangerous technology?

And even if they are, why isn't it a better idea to negotiate an international ban on this type of research instead of driving full force into it?

Creating ever more powerful weapons is a fool's game, and every knowing participant is a human monster.

Typo: should be “minecraft gap!”

1. Believe me I know the appeal of a hard technical problem. PhD in Vision here. :) 2. Military drone tech as such? Yes, billion-dollar industry.

> If we don't built war machines at parity, we become Ukraine. Toothless. Ripe for bullying at best, hostile takeover at worst.

That's only one part of the equation. It could be that the perpetual arms race also leads to situations like Ukraine's now, or many others in the recent past.

It's a way of thinking everything is a nail, since you are holding a hammer.

> Nature is metal. Look at orcas playing with food to teach hunting. Hornets laying larva in live prey. Lions eating out distant relatives alive.

Nature may be metal, but we aim to be better. After all, when a male lion takes over a pride, he often kills the cubs sired by the previous male; do we want that in human society? The good old "is-ought" [1] problem of philosophy applies here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

But in terms of budget, whatever your budget is, as long as its finite it will always be a zero sum game between "mostly civil" and "mostly military" applications, fuzzy as that line is of course.

That is dangerously bad thinking. MAD is a pipe dream, and the world is still much closer to annihilation today than it was before nuclear weapons were invented. There have been far too many close calls to count.

Secondly, no country will back down on the calculations of some unproven AI. And those calculations could only be proven in blood.

A humorously-named method I like is LSD-SLAM: Large-Scale Direct Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.

It is fast, and it produces the richest point clouds I've seen, from even monocular video. The "Direct" comes from directly using pixels, not features such as SIFT/SURF.

I suppose it could be used in environments with not too many reflective or transparent objects.

The days of hunter-killer drones flying willy nilly through arbitrary environments is already here! What do you think Predator drones are doing in the Middle East?

> A drone air force is much cheaper than a traditional one with pilots.

"Cheaper". This might be a reason it won't happen. At least not until wealthy militaries have learned some hard lessons.

Not always more formidable machine.

Aircraft without human inside can be smaller, more expendable, can perform longer missions and tolerate higher g-forces.

In the near term yes, humans and AI will have to work together. Eventually the only limiting factor in the AI's progress will be the human component.

For stuff like these drones, where is the benefit of a human component? Picking the drone up off the ground? Being a spotter? Driving the drone to wherever you want it to fly?

Lets take self driving cars for example. The benefit there is we no longer have to drive, but you also lose millions of jobs (taxis, trucking, etc).

Capitalism isn't going to take a romantic approach to AI / human harmony. It will do what it always does, cut costs and turn profits at the absolute expense of everything that's not creating shareholder value. And to that extent, the military industrial complex will do exactly the same thing, just replace shareholder value with bloodshed.

This seems like an exercise in futility. Robotic killers don't need to be sophisticated or expensive; writing international law is largely useless when the technology isn't limited to nation states.

Put the engineers in charge of the executive state, then we can talk.

You're missing an important caveat of your own argumentation; if you believe in Liberalism you must by extension have some skepticism concerning the ability of authoritarian states to, "keep up" with freer states in terms of innovation and cultural robustness. Otherwise you're arguing for an arbitrary terminal struggle between competing world cultures. (try reading history). You're basically scared by the current war in Ukraine and are willing to take on an ugly foreign policy position to feel safe.

It's going to be a bunch of software developers wearing t-shirts and shorts that eventually bring us to nuclear war. You know, "to keep their daughters safe."

Fuck all of you.

> Do you think it’s a risk that more authoritarian and belligerent states develop them first?

It does not require the development and realization of a technology to create a defense against that technology. We don't fight bombers with bombers, nor do we fight ICBMs with ICBMs, nor nukes with nukes (OK, perhaps not the best example, but only because MAD is a political deterrant against rational actors (which one can argue Putin is not)).

> Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, that did not bring them peace. Arguably if they had nukes, they would not be at war.

Only if they were depraved enough to use them. At which point they have to concede that they too will be annihilated. The threat of nukes alone does not prevent a country from being attacked - especially by madmen.

I think there is an argument being made that the drone technology enables a distancing of “the person doing the killing” from the action. That being 200 miles, or 2000, from the person being killed lets one take the decision to kill more lightly. Drone operation becomes like a video game.

The worry is that such distancing increases the risk of collateral damage, or simply mistaking of targets. There were accusations during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that the US were bombing weddings and civilian homes.