Most of it is spent on personnel and operation.
You'd want to know only what the procurement is - which is ~$146B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
And most of that is part of Gross Fixed Capital Formation already...
It seems totally possible that enough interest groups don’t want Ukraine to actually win, so they block anything more than the minimum viable amount. So it’s not much of a barometer at all for anything…
There's probably some small-ish 'dark budget'. But think about it: the official budget is in the order of single digit percentage points of US GDP. That represents and enormous amount of resources. Any appreciable fraction of that in a 'dark budget' would also leave traces all over the place.
The world is vastly more complex than say the world of 1945, so almost certainly there are now likely several dozens to several hundreds of ‘epicycles’ that are in fact true and necessary for full understanding.
Edit: Now the pentagon doesn’t contain the entire complexity of mankind within it… but it’s probably not that far off.
What bearing does what you mention have on the question on whether things got more or less complicated?
> Also, when expected outcomes don't align with perceived results, it's usually best but not very human to doubt yourself.
Eg this seems like something that would apply equally well at any time?
> Whoever has Shor/Grovers going first, has a advantage equitable to winning the AGI race... That too can win wars.
We have plenty of quantum resistant options, and people are already switching over.
And the story of the Enigma and its encryption shows that cryptographic and its breakage was already important back in the day.
> Nothing is simple and perceived simpleness is on the clock, for everyone.
How is this different now than before, though?
In monteary terms, this is barely more expensive than maintainig enough of a weapons stockpile during peacetime to counter Russia. And at the end of the conflict, anti-war sentiment within Russia might reach Germany post WW2 levels.
By comparison, more overt support to Ukraine, enough for Ukraine to at least humiliate Russia and throw them all the way out of the country, would only serve to help spread the anti-West hate within Russia, and generate support for even more ambitious rearmament in the years that would follow.
Pretty much like Germany after WW1.
> Accounting for non DoD military-related expenditure gives a total budget in excess of $1.4 trillion.[91]
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/
Somewhere between $900B and $1T this year
I don't have papers but I think calculators, which are amazing and necessary, impact people's mental calculation capabilities. I know I used to he better at multiplication when i didn't have calculators all around me.
IMO, AI will have similar impact. Great advance overall but will nerf some areas of or mental capacity.
Like astronauts losing muscle mass faster in zero gravity.
AI impact on our brain, just like the calculator, might be a reasonable price to pay for the advancement it gives.
My manual calculation skills were at their peak in seventh grade in school, when we were allowed to use a calculator for the first time (and thus the exercises got harder) but simultaneously I usually forgot to bring mine.
But yeah, I don't think I could think better in general, when I did arithmetic better.
I thought it was really damning how Apple's recent ads involved a celebrity using it to respond to their agent about a script proposal they didn't actually read.
It just turns out that AGI (artificial general intelligence, which ChatGPT objectively is), is not a singularity nor even a tipping point towards causing one.
Put this another way, suppose we create a computer program that is only as smart as a bottom 10% human (I'm not saying they have.) You can't reasonably say that is smarter than humans generally. But are you comfortable saying that bottom 10% humans lack any general intelligence at all? General intelligence doesn't mean extreme intelligence, and so Artificial General Intelligence doesn't either. You might say that the term is more than the sum of the parts, which is fair, but I still dispute that superhuman abilities was ever part of the definition of AGI. It was just a (thusfar) failed prediction about AGI.
Now you could find a software that is smarter than some percentage of humanity in a few tasks. Is that software AGI? Is AlphaGo AGI? Is the Google Deep mind AI gamer AGI?
What you are getting confused about is that there is a segment of people that have purposefully confused / conflated ASI (artificial SUPER intelligence) with AGI, due to their own beliefs about the hard-takeoff potential of AGI. This notably includes the founders of OpenAI and Anthropic, and early backers of OpenAI prior to the release of ChatGPT. Through their success they've set the narrative about AGI, but they are doing so by co-opting and redefining a term that has a quarter century of history behind it.
The core mistake started with Bostrom, although to his credit he is very careful to distinguish ASI from AGI. But he argued that once you had AGI (the ability to apply intelligence to solving any problem) you would rapidly get ASI through a process of rapid iterative design. Yudkowsky took those ideas a step further in his FOOM debate with Robin Hanson in 2008, in which he argued that the AGI -> ASI transition would be short, measured in months, weeks, days, or even mere hours. In 2022, six months prior to the release of ChatGPT, Yudkowsky has a public meltdown in which he asserted there is no time left and we're all going to die, after having been privately shown an early version of ChatGPT.
It's almost two years since the release of ChatGPT, which is absolutely AGI by the definition of the people who coined the term and have run the AGI Conference series for ~25 years, or by the definition of Bostrom or Yudkowsky for that matter. ChatGP is general intelligence, and it is artificial. Two years of AGI, yet we are still here and there is no ASI in sight. Yudkowsky was wrong.
Yet OpenAI, which was founded by a bunch of Yudkowsky acolytes, is still out there saying that "AGI" will bring about the singularity, because that was the core assumption underlying their founding and the reason for the investments they've received. They can get away with this without changing their message because they've subtly redefined "AGI" to mean ASI, and are hoping you don't notice the slight of hand.
And even them it would have to be split during a decade or two. And even then.
What's the military budget of USA?