And that's the end of democracy. One of the safe guards of democracy is a military that is trained to not turn against the citizens. Once a government has fully autonomous weapons its game over. They can point those weapons at the populous at the flip of the switch.
The parallel for this is when Rome changed from only recruiting citizens for their army to recruiting anyone who could pass the physical. They had no choice, and the new armies were much better at fighting. But the soldiers also didn’t have the same stake in the republic that voting citizens did.
Citizens were loyal to Rome. Soldiers were loyal to their commanders. If commanders wanted to launch rebellions, the soldiers would likely support them.
A commander who commands the loyalty of legions by convincing a handful of drone operators would be very dangerous for democracy.
Right - for the same reasons a Waymo is safer than a human-driven car, an autonomous fighter drone will ultimately be deadlier than a human-flown fighter jet. I would like to forestall that day as long as possible but saying "no autonomous weapons ever" isn't very realistic right now.
If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.
I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.
Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.
Hah, I had the same realization about landmines. Along with the other commenter, really it would be better to add intelligence to these autonomous systems to limit the nastiness of the currently-deployed systems. If a landmine could distinguish between a real target and an innocent civilian 50yrs later, it's be a lot better.
It's weird that people still think that the people who's job it is to kill people, or make things that kill people, really care about people more than the killing part. They don't give a shit who blows up, as long as no one comes knocking on their door about it.
It's only Anthropic with their current models saying no. Fully autonomous weapons have been created, deployed, and have been operational for a long time already. The only holdout I've ever heard of is for the weapons that target humans.
Honestly, even landmines could easily be considered fully autonomous weapons and they don't care if you're human or not.
I do not understand this move by Nvidia, they are afraid of being out competed by this startup in their core competence of building chips for AI? They may be eliminating a competitor for now but this move will immediately many more AI chip startups to get founded
They're not eliminating a competitor, they're (effectively) acquiring a competitor. Nvidia's GPUs are great for training, and not bad for inference, but the custom chips are better for inference and Nvidia's worried about losing customers. Nvidia will no doubt sell custom Groq-like chips for inference now.
groq is a series E hardware startup founded in 2016. It took them this long to be a potential threat, I'm not sure they are even an actual threat.
Even if this purchase causes 100 new hardware startups to be funded tomorrow, nVidia is perfectly fine with that. Let's see how many survive 5 years down the line
the play is 10x faster inference leads to 100x demand give or take, which isn't a bad assumption at all if you ask me. the problem is actually fitting a good model onto hardware that fast.
Right because countries with smaller populations can't beat larger ones when defending their homeland. Oh wait that's exactly what happened in Afghanistan vs USSR and USA, Vietnam etc.
No-one is. If that's a hint at Russians, then no: they were on a brink of war throughout the 70s, tensions in the 80s, basically ignored one another since the 90s, however since the start of Ukraine war and both being on the receiving end of sanctions they started to drift closer, which could be described as "the West pushing Russia into Chinese embrace."
This only takes into account income tax and not other taxes which are often more regressive such as sales tax, payroll tax etc. When analyzing taxes paid we should take into account all taxes
That's fair to call our democrats when they say things with contempt but is this not a phenomenon that happens from both sides now? What about when JD Vance calls out 'miserable childless cat ladies'? Donald Trump is a person who more so than anyone else I know of in American history is filled with grievance and contempt.
Right leaning supporters online love to throw around contemptuous terms like groomer, pedophile, cuck, soyboy etc
Of course it's a problem when Trump and Vance do it.
But to me, the difference is this: Vance said "miserable childless cat ladies" about people who were Harris supporters. They already weren't going to vote for Trump. But the Democrats are pointing contempt at people that have, historically, been the Democrats' core constituency.
Vance is alienating Harris voters, Democrats are alienating their own voters. In that way, it's different. It's not morally different - contempt is contempt - but it's practically different.
Give me a fucking break. Trump trashes segments of America for years and gets a pass but if a democrat makes a single pissed off comment it's a big deal.
Was Mike Pence getting chosen for his Christian background not an example of identity politics? Was JD Vance being a younger politician to balance old Trump identity politics? Everything relates to identity politics
