Infantry weapons powered by the kind of computer vision and facial recognition AI easily demonstrable today would be incredibly frightening, no matter how they were used. Of course there's no way of stopping this in an adversarial world.

Surely it would only be a matter of choosing to increase the efforts for a year or so in order to take these weapons from proof-of-concept to highly effective. E.g. autonomous flying gun platforms that can be deployed en masse and let loose with small or no human oversight (e.g. "hold the button to kill the person the machine has identified as a valid target", if even that level of control), or the kind of flying, target-seeking grenades envisioned in the linked video. With any level of autonomy, loitering and communication with command. It's only ethics and public perception that stops this today. In total war, a 20% mis-classification rate doesn't matter. Bombing doctrine in WW2 was much, much worse than this in its effect on civilians. Hell, many military leaders emphasized killing civilians as a desirable objective. Even present-day attacks consider "collateral damage" acceptable, even if politicians sometimes pretend otherwise.

Defending against weapons like that would be an arms race in itself, and completely beyond the reach of weaker actors. At least on a tactical level. Maybe there's strategies that could be employed as a low-cost defense, such as staying out of sensor range or confusing the sensors with adversarial patterns, but it would crush the resistance of anyone that tried a conventional defense.

Does the post-WW2 doctrine of emphasizing trade and the un-profitability of war, or ensuring that it is more economical for everyone to support a stable, free democratic economic system, still have any hope of preventing such weapons from being used?

I agree with you. But I think there is a bigger "weapon". When dust size monitoring is pervasive, how can anyone acquire weapons or coordinate any resistance? Dust is everywhere. And teams of nano-weapons can kill people (this has been reported as research for well over a decade, so anyone could reasonably assume that unreported research has gotten a lot further.) You don't need armies when nobody can effectively fight you or even acquire or build any weapon of any sort. So I don't worry as much about WW3 - since WW3 can be prevented with the pervasive monitoring technology on the near horizon. (There may be a WW3, but we have bigger problems coming up.)

When the map starts to reach the same size as the territory, don't you then need a map for the map? Pervasive monitoring sounds like one hell of a dataset to search through. Sure, you can use it to follow things you have already identified, but just because you have recorded something, doesn't mean that you know that you have recorded it.

Some people wonder why Cloudera (Hadoop and now Spark) had such high stock prices. But the real investors and the real clients were not public. Now, we all know that these systems are limited both in data volume and ability to run all the Machine Learning algorithms - but this problem is looking more and more solvable - and there are many who are trying outside of the public eye.

I think self-censorship itself is a problem. Just knowing that there are sensors around, many may remain silent.

Catharsis. I had been suspicious of similar things since early 2000s, thinking that the technology must be there. Surprised how only-ok sensors were while at research institutions (I avoided career paths even adjacent to military per principle).

Perhaps this is naive: One matter I never hear of, and is underestimated is automation of the legal system, and its equalizing effect. I have high hopes for it, although to be fair, our society is as unequal as we are. But those who cannot win the battle will have everything they need. And those who never have enough will be put in their places, and ideally technologists and scientists can take over from politicians, if we aren't automated ourselves. Then I wish to submit a request for democratization of computing power to the legal skynet, which grants it, and that in theory gives me my freedom as much as a gun claims it does. I should be able to own dust sensors to monitor intruding dust sensors. High hopes.

Some people make fun of elon musk for mars, but he has a point.

But thanks for turning my fanthom chills into real ones. The downvotes are from those who believe otherwise, which is not bad at all to see.

I wanted to mention something about certain areas of research on similar grounds, but I am not topping dust sensors by a long shot. Although my suspicions are probably correct then.

Again, I am probably on the naive-spectrum, but deep down, I feel if I don't ever go after money, I'll have less of a say in how the world plays out, and I am more fair than most I know, so I have a responsibility (I currently do research for research's sake, attic-style, and unfortunately I am only moderately bright, but bright enough to see through the facade where I am living that many many things only exist and function so the rich may remain rich, despite new technologies).