AI shaping warfare Vs. Using AI to justify outrageous warfare
would you like me to list the applicable sections of the Geneva convention?
I think the last one should be first on the list: regular people are afraid AI will negatively affect their economic security (i.e. knowledge and service workers will get the rust-belt factory worker treatment).
And the potential of giving knowledge and service workers the rust-belt factory worker treatment is exactly what makes Wall Street excited about AI and has the AI company leaders salivating about the profit they can make.
Warfare, policing, bio-engineered viruses are theoretical and far down the list.
AI industry insiders (including "safety" groups like ControlAI) talk about the dangers only in terms of its power: "Scheming", job loss, breaking containment, the New Cold War with China.
Critics outside the industry talk in terms of its lack of power: Inaccuracy, erroneous translation of user intent, failure to deliver on its promises and investment, environmental cost from the former, and ultimately the danger of people in power (e.g. law enforcement, military officials) treating its output as valid and unbiased, or simply laundering their wishes through it.
The broader public is just now barely beginning to understand because all they have to do is ask a chatbot. AI does not enable new capabilities, but it does aggregate an idea into a rough sketch and do it quickly on-demand.
None of this really means it will play out that way. The devil is in the details. What it does mean is much more nuanced attention on the politics and money because that's where the power always was.
The big investment into Project Stargate is all about managing risk. The government contractor and security clearance situation is out of control. As well, every human mistake is costly and time consuming to address. If you instead blame it on AI, you can skip the court proceedings and postmortems.
The other part of this is likely an attempt to surface information with summaries and shorten the chain of command. This is just a power grab and a dangerous dismissal of necessary implementation detail. It's a tantrum being thrown by ignorant people at the top being displaced. We live in an ever-complicated world that demands more experienced leadership than we have available. AI is their hail mary pass.
LLMs are being abused as a political battering ram. They are not the technological breakthrough advertised. The AI label is borderline absurd. AGI even moreso. NLP is an accessibility tool at best.
And I am saying this as a person who actually likes this tech.
Obviously, they still overhype and oversell this end of humanity stuff, but this argument regurgitated ad-nauseam is not THAT great of an example when you think about it.