Like, seriously, I don't think most people can comprehend the speed of robots, much less the speed of the processing controlling them. I think it's one of those things you should just intuitively understand if you're living in the modern world.
If the robots ever do rise up, and I'm not saying they will, you won't see it coming!
Hard to quote the video but from wikipedia[1]:"Micromice are among the highest-performing autonomous robots."
Things like fans and ground effect being used to make these devices do 6g turns while mapping and solving a maze.
Alternately, the world of quadcopters, face recognition (body warmth recognition required?), lidar will make for a terrifying battlefield.
Detecting heat via infrared will still be useful, any kind of engine gives off heat. Whether biological or mechanical.
You can construct engine that have disguise their heat signature a bit, or that have a smaller heat signature. But that severely limits their capabilities, which might be a good enough outcome for the sides that use the heat detection.
Edit: and not everyone will have robots.
It's not pretty, but war never is. I am surprised at how people today can point at a war and be surprised that atrocities happen. World Wars, Korea, Vietnam let alone the immediate history of Israel. Serbia and Croatia anyone?
It's not like we don't have plenty of historical sources. War is bad business and trying to claim that "civilians" should be exempt is not fooling anyone who's had even a precursory glance over such material.
This kinda plays out already - where not every "side" has a military or soldiers, so the battle is fought between soldiers and "civilians".
Any battle between a state with drone invading forces and one without, is going to be indistinguishable from an invading robot army indiscriminately killing all the civilians.
It’d be nice if all wars were basically a simulated conflict with robots fighting each other far from any humans but the defector that turns their robots on human populations will always have an advantage in actually winning wars.
Besides, these are wars of attrition where killing off the young men who fight wars is the entire point. A robot that takes a few months to manufacture instead of 18 years to raise changes the calculus entirely.
The robot could still take 18 man-years to manufacture.
War is largely about fear / intimidation. Yes, an RTS-like "destroy the assets" is how it's abstracted, but ultimately it's about intimidating a leader and population into submission. Keeping the attackers away from cities is very much part of that calculus, as is dropping long-range attacks on those cities.
If both sides have robots that take months to manufacture, the goal would still be the same: "Keep their robots away" and visa-versa "Get into their population centers and seize power symbols". At this stage, with established defenders, the goal seems to be "seize ground yard by yard"
And "outproduce them" aka "grind down their will" is still going to be a viable strategy.
The genocide was not the war. It was a "police" operation against a nearly entirely unarmed enemy.
The war was to to stop Germany from expanding past its borders, and also maybe to stop the genocide.
As I understand it, Racism was a strong motivator in the propaganda. It was part of Hitler's narrative even before he was in power (something something culture destroyers something something parasites lorem ipsum)
Only recently have I noticed that some groups support a Theory that downplays racism because people are obediently blind. I have seen racism and xenophobia and know it is neither obedience nor blind. But as to the extend of the power it held in the Germany of 1930, I have only read about it.
Hitler had delusions about "Aryan" race, white blond people, even though he was not blond. Also, the war was mostly fought in Europe (or at least started in), i.e. mostly among people of the same race.
It couldn't have been "xenophobia" either, given he wasn't even German!
A lot of people who were sent to the concentration camps, besides Jews, were Roma (Gypsies), gays [1], Slavic people, probably more.
I havne't studied history that deeply, maybe this talk about "undesirables" was all just propaganda, conveniently constructed to help fulfill military goals, but it's clearly far from neatly fitting "racism / xenophobia".
Of course this kind of scenario was the fantasy outcome of the lightning win over and occupation of Iraq, with "thunder runs" and such, but in the longer term it didn't work out that way.
Most wars today don't occur in trenches in the middle of nowhere. Actually the most recent thing I can think of is medieval battlefields but even then a major component of warfare were sieges which targeted entire cities because it didn't make sense to have your military fortress out in the sticks where it was easy to cut off the supply lines. Even World War 1 doesn't count because the "middle of nowhere" where the trenches were were often only uninhabited because of the war.
That said, we won't see wars of Terminator-style killing machines pitted against each other just like we don't see genuine tank-on-tank duels anymore. It's far cheaper to put some explosives on a UAV and call it a day. Any evenly matched war between nations capable of producing battle robots is likely one between nations with access to nuclear bombs. If Indian border conflicts are any indication, those wars are more likely to be fought with literal sticks to avoid any action that could trigger a nuclear first strike.
I think we will now have asymmetric wars.
Africa doesn't count because those countries don't have nuclear bombs
The Russo-Ukrainian war seems pretty serious.
> The loser would go nuclear.
If annihilation was viewed better than even unconditional surrender, unconditional surrender would never have happened in the past. But it has, and thus if there is a credible marginal threat of nuclear retaliation for a nuclear strike, there is very good reason to suspect that the loser in major convential war would not go nuclear. The risk of nuclear escalation of course impacts the calculus of war involving one or more nuclear powers, but a firm statement that “the loser will go nuclear” does not seem justified, except perhaps in the case where the otherwise winning side is not, and would not (at least in the perception of the losing nuclear power) in the event of nuclear attack be protected by, a nuclear power.
> Africa doesn't count because those countries don't have nuclear bombs
The vast majority of non-African countries also don't have nuclear bombs.
it depends if loss will be significant enough to justify mutual annihilation. Assume Russia attacked Finland, and NATO started military operation and lost. It will be very unlikely France, Brits and Americans will launch nukes for Finland loss.
Instead of "serious" I wanted to say "With serious possibility of escalation" I mentioned Asymmetric conflicts, as the two conflicts occupying our international News (Gaza & Ukraine) are good examples
I don't have any foundation to have an opinion on an invasion to Finland. I would expect there was a possibility of escalation as that is the only purpose of belonging to NATO. I would expect nobody to escalate over a Taiwan Invasion.
I think China won't seriously threaten Indian borders, just based on having nuclear weapons or not. (An opinion hanging of a spider threat)
there is semiconductor industry on the table. I think there is high chance NATO will be suppressing invasion forces through launching anti ship missiles from aircrafts and cruisers as well as secretly supplying them to Taiwan.
I'm sure there was a plot or something too
It could mean no revolution happens ever again and the currently established dictatorships stay as they are forever.
For example, Adolf Hitler was toppled by losing a war.
East Germany was toppled (partially) because their economy was broke, not because of lack of face recognition.
> [...] the currently established dictatorships stay as they are forever.
Stalin was toppled by death. There was still a dictatorship after him, but it did not stays as it was under Stalin.
See also PR China under Mao and under Deng Xiaoping. Very different regimes.
But it seems to me, that it's going to be impossible to revolt against a party who controls an obedient killbot army.
Hitler was a special case, since he played the dumb world domination game.
99% of computing power is used for "make work"¹ (graphics, teetering stacks of abstraction and now AI) so things don't really feel different to humans on a desktop level other than "shinier, drop shadows and in 4k I guess?", but the actual capabilities of computers are virtually unlimited in the context of some tasks.
If the robots turn against us and they don't need to use all their cycles on the abstractions and other human frippery, then we're really in trouble. A true AGI will know how to wring everything out of a scrap of silicon and human engineers will be wondering how a program that looks like random noise and fits in a STM8 can possibly be the controller of a captured drone, right before they get headshotted with a ball bearing fired by a passing drone at 1000 feet that picked their heartbeats out of the ambient soundscape or something.
Humans' best defense then would be somehow hide behind something computationally intractable where the AI couldn't use it's raw computing power. I'm not really sure what that would be, though (if I were, I'd probably write a novel!).
¹: well technically all human endeavour is make work, so this isn't meant as a slight, though I have some opinions on the state of modern software, just that the vast majority of the cycles aren't doing the core thing you're trying to use the computer to do. For example a graphical calculator program may be running the thick end of a hundred million instructions to run a handful of actual ALU ops.
Robots that would win the Ukraine war would look like a barrage of drones or missiles (either stealthy or in overwhelming numbers) flying into the air defence radars. There are 100m-wide radio dishes in orbit, the exact location and type of every radar on earth is known. Followed by standoff hammering with precision artillery (both the guns and the shells are fundamentally robotic) and lots more drones and missiles.
The this hasn't happened seems more a question of not revealing capabilities the US feels it might one day need as a trump card. Combined with not wishing to aggravate things to much (they say) or, cynically, not wishing to let the war end until the Russians are bled dry. Don't want them to capitulate while still in possession of anything more advanced than a Mosin-Nagant.
The energy efficiency of the human body is what is actually mind boggling vs robotics.
You may enjoy Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks, which features a plot point along these lines
Tuning that sucker must have taken so much time in going for the absolute fastest speed.
The guy's face of accomplishment tells me pressing GO is nerve wracking and that risk of it exploding is non-zero.
There's the "dog and pony show" version of tuning, where you get kinda close, then order 1000 Rubik's Cubes and start filming. Eventually you get lucky.
I get nervous at a demo in front of Important Stakeholders even though the thing seems to work perfectly up to that point. Because demos summon gremlins.
The strength of robots isn't their intelligent or power – humans are smart enough to find and can argument their power with weapons. What we cannot compete with is their speed. Fighting a robot would be like trying to fight Neo at bullet speed. We wouldn't have a chance.
Is the ego (Borg queen) manifesting (appearing only after TNG) to quell the neurotic, all-consuming pursuit of answers to technically impossible but theoretically valid questions? Did bare, mechanic cognition come first, then some way to reflect on and steer it as a defense mechanism to getting stuck in catatonic or compulsive loops?
wat
Just toss them a couple with the stickers swapped about.
Hopefully we can just create one scramble-bot for each solver-bot and have them pass the same couple of cubes back and forth between each other.
you must be talking about humans. AIs may show up to watch robo-cars races.
And these systems will absolutely emerge there if the war lasts long enough.
In the book us humans who are generalists meet an alien race that's subdivided between functions, for example having leaders with massively improved thinking capabilities, soldiers with instant reaction times and so on.
It does really well to show that generalists can be great at a lot of things, but extremely inferior when measured against a single category.
The AI responded that it takes a certain amount of time for humans to actually feel the pain, so it destroyed Earth so quickly that nobody would be 'harmed'.
Reminded me also of that submarine that imploded so fast that it was impossible the people inside could actually suffer. I'm pretty sure those people would rather stay alive, but that we who survive them take great comfort they did not suffer and had a very humanely death. Whatever a humanely death may actually be...
I think robots are a rather clunky end state for anything that would likely have some autonomy over it's evolutionary path.