My patron saint

I attended a federal contracting conference a few months ago, and they had one of these things (or a variant) walking around the lobby.

From talking to the guy who was babysitting it, they can operate autonomously in units or be controlled in a general way (think higher level unit deployment and firing policies rather than individual remote control) given a satellite connection. In a panel at the same conference, they were discussing AI safety, and I asked:

Given that AI seems to be developing from less complex tasks like chess (which is still complicated, obviously, but a constrained problem) to more complex and ill-defined tasks like image generation, it seems that it’s inevitable that we will develop AI capable of providing strategic or tactical plans, if we haven’t already. If two otherwise-equally-matched military units are fighting, it seems reasonable to believe that the one using an AI to make decisions within seconds would win over the one with human leadership, simply because they would react more quickly to changing battlefield conditions. This would place an enormous incentive on the US military to adopt AI assisted strategic control, which would likely lead to units of autonomous weapons which are also controlled by an autonomous system. Do any of you have any concerns about this, and if so, do you have any ideas about how we can mitigate the problem.

(Paraphrasing, obviously, but this is close)

The panel members looked at each other, looked at me, smiled, shrugged, and didn’t say anything. The moderator asked them explicitly if they would like to respond, and they all declined.

I think we’re at the point where an AI could be used to create strategies, and I would be very surprised if no one were trying to do this. We already have autonomous weapons, and it’s only a matter of time before someone starts putting them together. Yeah, they will generally act reasonably, because they’ll be trained on human tactics in a variety of scenarios, but that will be cold comfort to dead civilians who happened to get in the way of a hallucinating strategic model.

EDIT: I know I’m not actually addressing anything you said, but you seem to have thought about this a bit, and I was curious about what you thought of this scenario.

I was home schooled from childhood through highschool. I got a GED before I joined the military, then used the GI bill to go to university and took placement tests for everything, which put me at the same level as everyone else except for trigonometry, which I had to take a remedial class in.

Yeah, the US grade system up to highschool. I haven’t done those grades at all.

Never have I ever gone to school in grades K-12.

Just wait until they start serving ads for things that don’t exist and then throwing manufacturing together to make them on demand.

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Going meta is always allowed. Just say you’re dumbing it down, that you don’t mean to be condescending, and invite them to interrupt if they already understand.

I’m imagining the mob standing around the guy scratching their heads, with the noose pulled all the way up to the branch.

If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you’re in the wrong room.

My planes had groups, but I don’t think they were grouped by seat.

Burn the heretic.

Ah yeah, true. Even with minor exceptions, I still feel like it could be done better. I’m just bitter because I had to take four different planes this week.

That’s the problem with society- all the damn people. *Shakes fist at cloud*.

Load the goddamn plane by column, window seats to aisle seats, grouped by odd/even seat numbers and make people line up largest seat number to smallest. It takes an extra five minutes before you board the plane and saves you twenty or thirty. It wouldn’t even cost you the five if it was the standard.

It’s also 60", which is absurdly large to me lol. Glad I could help, though.

I hope someone shook her hand and thanked her for her service before they put her away.

No worries. I feel like you probably do have to be a masochist to consume Tate media of any type, so it still works.

Ah, my bad. Sorry.

I have one. It’s 4k, which gave me some trouble from an Ubuntu media server, and the refresh rate is ~144, I believe. It cost me something like 300-400 USD.