I’m worried that China will build said killing machines and that we’ll be unprepared.
Everyone will do this, because everyone will believe that everyone will do this.
Even worse, there really is no guarantee that the great powers will create the best terminators. Everyone talks about China and the US. (And we should.) At the same time however, we should all keep in mind that nations from India and Indonesia, to North and South Korea will not be simply sitting on their hands while the US and China forge ahead.
A future where 4 million dollar American or Chinese terminators are easily overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of 5 dollar Indian autonomous devices is not at all outside the realm of future possibilities.
That's what makes it all so concerning. We can kind of see where it leads in terms of enhanced capability potential for non-state actors, but we can't really see a way to avoid that future.
But seriously - you are describing the kind of thinking that caused ww1, and the nuclear arms race that almost caused human extinction. It’s a bad idea that goes bad places.
Jack booted thugs shot a man in the back for the crime of defending a woman and the administration called him a terrorist. Nothing happened to that thug either.
Most people don't understand this about China, and most reporters who go there are like "I spent 2 weeks in China and here's what it's like", or "I spent a semester studying at Beida (Peking U)".
10+ years ago there were places where social media posts were archived by some brave individuals before they were scrubbed so you could see what words were being targeted by censors. But that's long shut down to my knowledge.
And while we are waiting, there're another few wars to be done.
There’s absolutely no consensus that the legal definition is met, in contrast with another ongoing situation which enjoys wide recognition.
It feels that this is more a geopolitical cudgel, pulled out when the discourse against the US becomes negative. But given the events in the last years, this seems like a lost cause even in the West, never-mind the rest of the world.
But that's beside my point. It's too late to edit my post, so pretend I used the word "culling" instead of "genocide." How does one weigh a Uyghur culling against a South American regime change? What's the exchange rate?
They're investing their trade surplus in assets around the world, especially the third world.
When those assets start to go bad and/or the government nationalizes them?
We'll see if China responds any differently than any of the other colonial powers with business interests.