Both amazing and terrifying. Might be wishful thinking that as a race we do the right thing with these technologies but here is to hoping

The nation that makes the most use of this will succeed and spread the most.

AI is the new nuke.

We will likely see a rapid arms race in using AI in weaponry. If you can automate everything, wage a war without suffering human losses, you gain the ability to conquer without worry. If China develops autonomous soldier robots, autonomous warplanes, and decided to pre-emptively attack the US, what do you think would happen?

It seems to me as though the US has no choice but to develop this technology, lest they fall behind.

I'm not sure there's a realistic chance of avoiding dystopia.

AI will be used for population control and censorship. WW1 introduced new inhumane ways to mass murder tens of millions of people. AI in WW3 will be used in the same way - to thin the herd.

If AI is the new nuke what does nonproliferation look like?

Not an expert here, but I think one of the only reasons that nonproliferation works is because it’s generally difficult to make nukes without making it pretty obvious that you’re doing it. Even biological warfare is somewhat easy to identify. AI seems different in that it just requires intelligent people, compute power, and time.

Nations hoarding EMPs

What does it look like? Neuromancer's Turing Police

Let’s pre-empt that, even: assassinations of non-allied AI researchers?

Right and how did that work out for those 3? Wintermute still found a way.

The US would respond with nukes. Same scenario like today.

Maybe someone more knowledgeable can help me out, but I don't see how AI would actually change anything between world powers.

The entire practicality of airborne AI weapons systems in a hostile environment is still very questionable imo. Would the US really send off a B-21 Raider with a $700mn unit price into a battlefield without a pilot? Or even a f35 at $100mn each?

These AI pilot systems haven’t even seen 1st gen countermeasures. If the Iranians managed to spoof US military’s most advanced stealth unmanned drone (at the time) [1], bring it down and reverse engineer it, that should be a wake up call on how vulnerable these systems that rely on sensors are.

The US won’t even send ancient Abrams tanks to Ukraine out of fear their secret sauce armour lands in the hands of their foes. If you can’t send your best weapons then what’s the point?

[1] https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/16715072...

For everyone freaking out about this particular AI taking over the world, this is more of a response to air defense improvements by China and Russia. At the moment, with our current jets, we cannot find and destroy air defenses without losing pilots. Typically the bottleneck to aircraft attrition is trained pilots. It takes about 4 years to train an F-16 pilot and $6 million. Nearly twice as much for stealth fighters and bombers.

With modern air defense systems like the S-400 and THAAD, AI becomes essential for penetration of airspace without taking severe casualties. Using AI for wild weasel work makes much more sense. Having a 4 ship of F-16s loaded with HARMs and decoys, 20 miles ahead of your manned F-35, is an immense improvement in pilot survivability. In addition they can provide ECM to mask stealth fighters from advanced radar. We've always had drones that can do this work, but none that could survive a BFM encounter with the most basic fighter jet.

There are already scarier AIs than the ones piloting these F-16s. AIs designed to manipulate elections and generate propaganda. AIs that automate justice and perform predictive policing. AIs that create fake images and video. AIs that keep track of your every movement and purchase. AIs tracking your call logs and common associations. This one is actually to save the lives of pilots.

It's amazing how easy it is to justify literal killing machines.

Well, yeah. Ukraine could use some more of them about now.

Amazing.

No kidding. I really hope they come out okay soon. The agitprop on the US side is starting to get bad. The disinformation campaigns are ramping up and people are starting to believe them. We can already see the Republican side starting to move against them.

Yup, it's called a weapon. We've been doing it for a VERY long time. There are some people out there that would very much like to turn you into a corpse or a slave. If you don't want to be a corpse or a slave, along with your family and friends, then you will need them.

If you can find a world where you don't need access to Killing Machines, please let me know because I would very much like to live there.

Killbots are a very different kind of machine.

Let the bot battle begin!