
Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war - johnny313
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/09/07/artificial-intelligence-is-changing-every-aspect-of-war
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Thorentis
Just wait until somebody think it's a good idea to declare war, based on the
advice of an AI. That scares me more than anything.

Or launching nuclear weapons based on the advice of AI (or allowing AI to
control them altogether). All out nuclear war has so far been avoided multiple
times, because of an actual human making a split second decision at the right
moment.

~~~
ekianjo
Dr Strangelove, Skynet in Terminator, all of this has been talked about many
times before. The truth is that already most of nukes are probably automated
to ensure the concept of mutually assured destruction works.

~~~
cam_l
But really, as long as everyone believes in MAD, there is really no reason to
carry it out. Engineers working on these systems could quite reasonably, and
in good faith, install break points and avoid meaningless loss of life. Then
the only MAD system which actually needs implementation is if one of those
engineers talks..

~~~
musingsole
But for everyone to believe it, it has to be an at least reasonable belief.
Luckily, that's a low-ish bar with fairies being a somewhat common belief too
(I have no numbers but want them...). So those engineers for those same good
faith reasons install redundancies. Heh, it's a balance that may or may not
tip positive (everything working) or neutral (nothing happens) or negative
(everything sabotaged by an enemy actor) and we'll only know after the trigger
has been pulled.

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AndrewKemendo
The reality is, no state will be able to deter a major adversary in a future
war without automation being a significant part of how decisions are made.
Conventional (aka non-nuclear) offensive and defensive capabilities, across
air, space, land, maritime, subsurface and cyberspace move too quickly to rely
on "old" methods of defense and attack.

Modern technology also allows us to be faster, cheaper, safer and more
accurate, things that everyone wants from militaries worldwide. The goal of
automation/optimization is as few and short of engagements as possible.

The only thing better than no war is a short one.

~~~
SEJeff
This was pretty much exactly the reasoning behind the US military launching
the nukes on Japan at the time. They did their modeling and predicted very
heavy casualties on both sides for taking island by island vs the nukes making
Japan rethink the entire war.

I think all wars are tragic and am not sure that I agree dropping the nukes
was a good idea (I’m a US Army combat vet or OIF II btw), but this comment
seems eerily familiar.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Indeed, and Curtis Lemay - head of the firebombing campaign on Japan and later
head of SAC, the nuclear arm of the US Air Force - was the primary proponent
of the theory that War should be so bad and brutal for the purpose of ending
it swiftly.

"The New York Times reported at the time, "Maj. Gen. Curtis E. LeMay,
commander of the B-29's of the entire Marianas area, declared that if the war
is shortened by a single day, the attack will have served its purpose." This
view was later echoed by Japan's former Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe, who
said, "The determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing.""

War is hell, as you saw first hand, and those of us who are charged to execute
it want it to end as quickly as possible.

~~~
jrochkind1
I have a feeling some of the couple hundred thousand people killed in
hiroshima and nagasaki would have preferred the war to last one more day if it
could mean killing, say, 100K fewer civilians. If there were such tradeoffs to
be made.

But I suppose Maj. Gen. LeMay would have prefered killing yet additionals
hundreds of thousand civilians if it could mean saving the life of one
American soldier.

Just different perspectives I guess.

~~~
ryacko
The requirement for unconditional surrender prolonged the war, many arguments
could be made, but unconditional surrender was also necessary to prevent the
Japanese government from planning future wars by restructuring their society.

Grand strategy involves decisions for the welfare of societies for a century
into the future.

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gdubs
As an aside, “Fail Safe” (1964), is one of the best movies ever made, IMHO,
about the risks of technology and warfare. Once you get past the slow pacing,
the black and white... it’s an incredible film. It’s based on the same book as
Dr Strangelove — but just takes a completely different, dramatic take on the
material. You also get a chance to see why Henry Fonda is considered such a
legendary actor. Sidney Lumet, the director, is also a legend: “Dog Day
Afternoon”, “12 Angry Men”, “Network”...

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ditonal
Technologists need to realize that arms races will doom our children. The
solution is international agreements to not build horrifying weapons, not
subscribing to fear mongering that demands arms races.

~~~
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Exactly. Which is why we never had WWII because everyone at the end of WWI
realized this and signed treaties limiting their arms. Unfortunately, that is
not what happened.

The problem with this is that the more arms control we have, the more the
benefits of one party cheating.

~~~
acqq
WWII didn't happen "because one party was cheating." Everybody knew that
Hitler was building the huge army. The West allowed him to do that for years
because they believed it won't affect not them but only that "other" land that
they didn't like.

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EGreg
Understatement: [https://youtu.be/Yd4exe1aPfA](https://youtu.be/Yd4exe1aPfA)

Scary:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA)

Scarier:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqGY6sJpck](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FrqGY6sJpck)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Related to your last clip:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RHmA5eH-d4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RHmA5eH-d4)

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jrochkind1
The future is gonna be just great, right?

This is the stuff that terrifies me. It's a mistake to think we'll never find
ourselves in the middle of a warzone just because we live in a rich country.

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DubiousPusher
It was over morally for the human speciea the moment we ended up with a system
where by a single person could decide upon the extrajudicial killing of
another person via remote control and we did not collectively revolt. AI is
irrelevant. Once we have unleashed the mechanized killing of people via the
black box it doesn't really matter the layers of systems we build atop it.
Without the moral integrity to rebel against the clearest and most basic form
of this system we have already given ourselves over to it.

~~~
phreeza
When was this moment, sometime briefly after the invention of agriculture?

~~~
nindalf
Agriculture was invented fairly recently, around 8000BC. Homo Sapiens have
been living in groups for tens of thousands of years before that. One of these
group leaders would no doubt have ordered the death of a competing group. No
doubt that is what GP wanted us to revolt against.

~~~
DubiousPusher
That is not what I meant. Though the same impulse is perhaps at work, IDK.

The reason I find the modern version of this as adequate condemnation of our
species is several fold.

1) We profess a belief in human rights that goes back to our most basic
education. Most people in the West are indoctrinated with the values of human
rights.

2) We worship at the alter of those rights. We hold up MLK and Lincoln
(deserved or not) as our greatest citizens because of what they did for
individual liberty.

3) We acknowledge injustice. Every one of us is made aware of the horrors of
the colonial period, the Holocaust and the gulag.

Even the most ignorant among us is educated of the moral duties and the
ethical possibilities of our world. And yet, we choose to do nothing when our
own violate the values of our mythos.

The ignorance that can be said to cloak the violence of our forbearers cannot
cloak our own for we do not posses it.

~~~
jocoda
> 1) We profess a belief in human rights, etc

We talk like that. But it's just talk. It is clear from our behavior that this
is not the case.

I'd love to believe that it is just due to ignorance. Sometimes it is, but I
fear that we're running on tribal programming and that's not going to change
in a hurry.

~~~
DubiousPusher
This is kind of the core of why I think maybe the moral failures of our time
may uniquely condemn us.

In the past, the concious or wordy parts of our brain didn't exactly contain
the moral philosophy we have now which is supposed to counter our basic
cruelty.

We have hundreds of years of it. We call the enlightenment foundational to our
governments and ethics. Many people hold the Bill of Rights sacred like a
religious text. We have the most extreme examples of human cruelty to heed as
examples. Anyone may read about them, most American school children are
required to learn about them.

But even that knowledge, that programming is not capable of overcoming our
basic tendency toward violence and cruelty. Maybe, there are some behaviors
the wordy part of the brain just can't reason us out of.

I hope I'm wrong. Maybe there's an even better set of ideas than the
enlightenment, humanism, and human rights that will be more contagious and
more powerful to overwhelm our basic nature. Perhaps those ideas are already
out there in some culture being drowned out by the hegemony of Western moral
philosophy. IDK.

