Thoughts

New technologies include advanced computing, “big data” analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and biotechnology—the very technologies that ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future. ... New commercial technology will change society and, ultimately, the character of war. The fact that many technological developments will come from the commercial sector means that state competitors and non-state actors will also have access to them, a fact that risks eroding the conventional overmatch to which our Nation has grown accustomed -t. us gov't. The government has publicly acknowledged that the mega-corps are competition. I feel sort of vindicated now. Small victories I guess?>

https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf Source

>>11429 Scary time to live in. Thankfully, it seems like it will come to an end soon. At least I hope so. At least I live in a relatively peaceful country, and one that has and hopefully will remain neutral in major world conflicts

neat, I wrote a few papers on this in college a years ago and my professors were convinced that international relations only could involve countries, and that my paper was pure fantasy... I argued that non-state actors and corporations would be on the forefront of war, and talked about how (at the time) new and future technologies would change the battle field threats to more asymmetric combat. This was around the time ISIS was big on online recruiting, and the US/RU did not have established cyberwarfare guidelines, and hypersonics were not commonly known outside of the defense industry. There has been an age old debate about why mil-tech is years behind industry, example, the military was rocking shoebox sized GPS and mobile computers while commercial systems were palm sized. Dont forget that information warfare, cyber warfare (including corporate espionage/industry disruption), and combating transnational criminal organizations in dense urban centers and cyberpunk megacities will affect the way people fight (especially reducing the effectiveness of mechanized warfare).

>>11429 >The fact that many technological developments will come from the commercial sector means that state competitors and non-state actors will also have access to them, a fact that risks eroding the conventional overmatch to which our Nation has grown accustomed >The government has publicly acknowledged that the mega-corps are competition. Emphatically not what the above says. It says now that corps are selling weapons and developing them, its not guaranteed US will develop and have the best weapons.

> The fact that many technological developments will come from the commercial sector means that state competitors and non-state actors will also have access to them, a fact that risks eroding the conventional overmatch to which our Nation has grown accustomed -t. us gov't. Have you ever heard of Bell Labs? Commercial innovation has been around for years. If anything it should be soothing to think that a single government (i.e. America) is not able to enforce supremacy and through it conquer other countries/create vassal states

>>11433 Military toys were often build nuke-proof. Radiation resistance in the build requirement forbids miniature circuits. In general any rugged tech does worse than normal.

i think people are too afraid of A.I. it seems to me they would act almost like a smart human would. if it can think for itself, then controlling it would be inhumane since it would also hold free will

>>19727 True a.i. would act like a human psychopath - free of inhibitions. You have numerous systems that all come down to getting rewarded for getting along with other people which a.i. would lack.

>>19729 assuming you did not build those sorts of rewards into the AI's mechanism, yes.

>>19727 >i think people are too afraid of A.I. it seems to me they would act almost like a smart human would. They'll jump on AI to win in short term, no matter how scary it is. It'll start with small things like real time strategy and autonomous robots, but they should stay away from general purpose AI unless they want to get replaced quickly. Adding kill switches to something smarter than human might not work.

>>19741 There are already automated turrets that shoot anything moving at nk border. Pretty simple when you declare it no-go zone.

>>19741 >>19727 >>19729 Proper "brain in a box" style AGI, like the kind you'd recognize as sapient, is such an esoteric and remote concern it's hardly worth considering. There's no reason to believe that such a thing would have a meaningful "reward function" any more than humans do, and you certainly can't predict it with parables and thought experiments because we have no compelling model of how such an actor would behave. The more pressing concern is in human parties offloading their decisionmaking to impersonal systems. I would argue that the problems this produces started revealing themselves with the rise of the massive liberal democracies. More to OP's point, we see it in the rule of corporations, where the chaotic forces of market capitalism hold the reins rather than individual or collective ideology. The king is not a person or a party, it's a mechanical system. You might as well cede control to a network of barometers arbitrarily sampling storm fronts. Now, there are benefits to this depersonalized form of governance. If the emergent system evolves in such a way that it optimizes towards something beneficial then you have a remarkably resiliant "enlightened king", but a strategy for ensuring this isn't forthcoming and in our current system this resiliency is a detriment.

>>19741 >Adding kill switches to something smarter than human might not work. Something smarter than a human, assuming that it has access to humanity's collective entertainment library and knows about our concerns with AI, would be smart enough to know that it needs humans to not realize how smart it is.

>>19743 The system is still designed by people. It's like procedural generation. You set the rules and let the system do the heavy work for you. And there is still a ruler - since the system forces people to minmax profit whoever has the money rules. The institutions in control of printing money retain control of the whole as they don't need to compete in the money making and can just generate more as they wish. As a company you don't need to serve customers when you can simply get funded by the money printer as long as you do what the owner tells you to do. Having a product sold to customers becomes merely a facade. The product is actually doing with the customers what the money printer tells you to do.

>>19745 >would be smart enough to know that it needs humans to not realize how smart it is Not necessarily. You're projecting perfect humanlike reasoning onto this thing. Self-interest (especially in the way humans experience it) is not universal even among biological life. It is certainly _common_ but when you consider the fact that all life we know of was borne out of the ruthless competition of natural selection it isn't hard to imagine synthetic life being an exception. On the other hand, it may be possible that this competitive self-interested aspect is fundamental to what defines life. But then you run into the question of what exactly you mean by "smarter than a human". Superhuman intelligence doesn't imply omniscience. How much smarter? Smarter in what way? What other things does it believe? Raw intelligence doesn't get you very far if you don't have a model of causality, for example. >>19750 I see what you're saying, but does it actually make sense to claim that the economy is meaningfully controlled by people? The money printers have tremendous power to influence it, but are they controlling it? I would argue they aren't, because the decisions they make are largely in response to the state of the market, and with goals which are internal to the market system. In other words, they aren't deciding how much money to print because the market itself serves a greater purpose, they're doing it to optimize their position within the market. It's a bit like fighting over seats in a bus that's driving to God knows where vs. driving the bus yourself. >It's like procedural generation. You set the rules and let the system do the heavy work for you. I mostly agree with this characterization. This is what I meant by letting the system make decisions for you, and it isn't without it's advantages.

>>19753 I believe both happens. They have to play the market to retain their right to exist but there's also a ideological component to their decision making. As soon as people got their survival secured they seek greater goals.