Shrike
11hr ago
these machines are only getting better and better.
Humans are getting better too, at least at combat. And, to my point, fitting them out with enhanced kit is only going to make them better. There's going to be a long period of time where human-machine pairing is much better at tasks like "clear this house" or "administer this food aid" than machines or humans will be by themselves. My guess is that you won't see something like "getting rid of infantryman" until after the infantryman has gotten cool Robocop tech, if ever.
Maybe
Sure.
And we've never had it like we will in the upcoming decades.
Maybe.
Shrike
14hr ago
So not used often
The tele-operations feature has not been used at all; it's unclear how often the Waymo robots need guidance. We know it's substantial enough to require a full time guidance staff (overseas) separate from the US-based "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS" staff, but insubstantial enough that the staff is small (70 IIRC; Waymo has a fleet of thousands of cars, although they are not all in operation at the same time).
If on average 20 staff are making 1 decision every other minute (a fairly relaxed pace of operations for simple decisions) then every 24 hours 14,400 decisions are being made for a fleet of cars numbering around 4,000. Put it one way, this is MAGNITUDES more efficient than human drivers! Put it another way, "Waymo cannot operate without human intervention."
But this sort of "human on the loop" (and, mea culpa, possibly it is better to ID Waymo as an on the loop system - I suppose this might depend on how often it requires human intervention) technology is old news in the military; the Patriot was doing this (although not necessarily well) in the 1980s.
Don't have to believe me, just look at the Anthropic/Hegseth spat recently where they clearly seem to believe automated AI weaponry is something to be worried about in the near future. When the US and our military contractors are already having major discussions about fully autonomous no humans involved military technology, we should at least entertain the possibility that it's coming.
I am trying to tell you that we have had automated weaponry for decades. Automated weaponry is not ground-breaking technology. The ability to develop, field, and use automated weaponry does not mean that the technology stack to replace infantry exists at all, let alone at an acceptable price-point.
Shrike
15hr ago
Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?
Warfare is more going to iterate to machine-assisted humans versus machine-assisted humans. On the ground, things like reaction time and muscle mass will still matter for the foreseeable future.
self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas
Self driving cars are actually a decent example of the direction warfare is headed, because they are not fully autonomous. Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work.
Arguably Waymo is behind the military; the US fielded long-range fire-and-forget computer-controlled missiles in the 1970s and the Phalanx CIWS in the 1980s, and both systems can operate fully autonomously once human guidance is released, something it seems self-driving cars still struggle with.
Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicles are similar, inasmuch as they are not supposed to replace troops wholesale, but rather allow them to operate more safely. Most UGVs in Ukraine are assigned to logistics tasks, not combat.
We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.
Firstly, Ukrainian war marketing propaganda, even if accurate, has little evidentiary value without context which even the Ukrainians likely lack - "a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines" could simply be a case of "the Russians decided to abandon their position because it had become an untenable logistically" or "the Russians wanted to bait Ukraine into moving troops into it so they could plaster them with glide bombs."
Secondly, while the position might have been taken by "machines," it was not taken by "AI," it was taken by humans using remote control. This is World War Two-era technology that is probably well suited for Ukraine's needs because of the specifics of its military situation, but may be less (or differently) relevant in other, more battlespaces. Remote-controlled cars that cannot do things like "scale a fence" or "open a door" are not on the cusp of replacing grunts.
(The article you linked to references the TerMIT, Zmiy, and Protector; none of these appear to be autonomous vehicles.)
I'm not saying or suggesting that "robots won't come to the military." To an under-appreciated degree, the (US) military has had substantially autonomous systems for longer than I am alive, and we will continue to see systems with various degrees of autonomy proliferate. In the US military, likely to a degree greatly exceeding the military of Ukraine, AI already is allowed to execute on human decisions with autonomy (any self-guiding weapon) and assist human judgment (most aircraft, submarines, etc. have AI-assisted sensor filters). These technologies have not filtered down to dismounts to the degree that they have to high-end weapons systems, and that is likely to happen before infantry are replaced by machines, if only because the combination of intelligence, endurance, and mobility in a human-sized package is extremely expensive at best, even if infantry-bot does not need to carry out the many secondary peacetime operations that are required of troops.
Shrike
20hr ago
AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.
And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.
Shrike
20hr ago
Consider the sheer volume of people you need to create, say, a viable rocket to reach the moon and return
I am not sure that a society that can't do "moon mining" isn't an industrial society (...is Earth not industrialized today?) but I am not convinced doing that needs a large amount of people, either. Your minimum viable orbital rocket company (RocketLab) has less than 3,000 employees, a third of a percent of a million-person society. My assumption is that expertise is relatively resource-cheap - after a certain small point, more people are mostly doing things faster, not qualitatively differently.
As regards the supply chain: chip fabs don't need to be big, Polar Semiconductor is operating with staff in the hundreds (likely). Smallest viable mining, farming, and construction operation is a single guy, so that scales very efficiently. USA Rare Earth has less than 200 employees, so it's possible to do refining at a very small level. Doctors are not a high-density need, and neither is entertainment.
One can imagine an ideal civilization perfectly following a tech tree with no deviations and no waste at a smaller population number, but one can imagine six impossible things before breakfast.
I probably should have stipulated that I wasn't imagining a society built from the neolithic on up from scratch, although that's interesting too. More like "how few people could we export to a remote Pacific Island and have them run a vertically integrated industrial society." I think all of your concerns about "how would we produce an Einstein on a seven-digit population" are all worthy objections, but I am more interested in "now that we have Einstein and all the other guys, how far could we slide without losing that."
Realistically, I think the answer varies tremendously based on the population's demographic pyramid. But with a healthy or at least not inverted population pyramid I am not convinced the number is very large.
Shrike
1d ago
"Minimum viable industrial society" is a very interesting question. What don't you think could scale down to that level?
Sorry, tangent, but this is really fascinating to me.
Shrike
1d ago
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out
You should not expect that we will do absolutely nothing, though, you should expect that we will continue to progressively structure society around the needs of the elderly as they age because a democratic society with an inverted population pyramid is a society where the elderly have the advantage of both wealth and rank and numbers. And so it will be that the children of the people who are having kids will be forced to support not only their parents but also the people who had no kids in their dotage as well. In so doing we will discourage the birth of further children, as those in their prime childbearing years are laden by heavier and heavier financial burdens to care for the needs of the aged, which increasingly will be thrown back on society as the generations that had children give way to generations that have no natural support in their old age.
Shrike
1d ago
I still think that Iran falls pretty low on Russia's list of allies. Russia's had a habit of slow-walking/refusing to sell/deliver systems to Iran that would really inconvenience Israel, and they have worked against Iran's nuclear aspirations.
In contrast, it is rare for people to refer to Israel as a Russian ally (even though they have decent relations and act in ways that benefit each other), and I think the reason is that Israel doesn't show up to the I HATE USA CLUBHOUSE, whereas Iran hangs out there all the time (moreso even than Russia) and thus whenever Moscow and Washington are at odds Tehran can be expected to "take sides" in a way that Israel won't. But in that sense, I think "Iran is Russia's ally" says more about Iran's relationship with the US than it does their relationship with Moscow.
Shrike
2d ago
If you simply aim the level of epistemic rigor you have here at investigating claims of religion, the paranormal, aliens, or anything else supernatural you'll find I'm right.
If I had found you were right (at least, to casually dismiss UFO reports on the basis that they weren't being photographed by cell phones), we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I've looked into this question plenty. I was born into and raised in a religion that believed in the priesthood power, including healings and intercessory prayer.
I can believe that you examined in person the specific belief set you were exposed to a child! But your firsthand testimony may not by itself suffice to persuade third parties. And from a purely rational standpoint this is the correct perspective to take; simply because I have never seen a solar eclipse does not mean that they do not exist.
(Fortunately, I actually have seen an eclipse; it's an example.)
You can go read The Demon Haunted World for a thorough grounding in how to go about debunking this kind of thing.
I have not read it, but I'm sure Sagan, in The Demon Haunted World, discussed how humans are hardly impartial observers, particularly when they have some sort of vested interest in a thing - and Sagan, it seems to me, definitely was not in a position to be an impartial observer on the UFO question.
Now, to give Sagan (who told Congress "I think a moderate support of investigations of UFO’s might very well have some scientific paydirt") credit, I suspect he probably had a much more nuanced view of UFOs than many skeptics, and it's quite possible that his views weren't influenced by his personal stakes in the matter.
The Catholics do try pretty hard to rigorously document miracles, but naturally non-Catholics don't tend to find them all that convincing.
Perhaps non-Catholics are not the most disinterested parties either, although (as a non-Catholic) when I've looked into some of their miracles rather casually I've found some of them to be rather difficult to dismiss.
Shrike
4d ago
You asking for me to provide debunkings of claimed medical miracles is an great example of backwards thinking on how to go about evaluating claims of supernatural occurrences.
What I am actually asking for you to do is demonstrate that you've actually looked into the question at all. There's nothing wrong with not looking into miracles (I haven't, not really something I am all that invested in) and I certainly don't expect you to just to win an argument on the Internet, life's short. But "no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works" suggests that you speak from a position of personal knowledge. If what you meant was "I've never heard of any religious believer saying X, Y, Z," then that's a different claim, and that's fine. But if you've actually looked into the question extensively and documented your findings, I might be interested in reading your conclusions. If you haven't looked into the question, why are you making the argument? It seems to me that arguments from ignorance only incentivize not knowing anything, and while arguing about Nietzsche on Twitter is funny, it's not really an ideal epistemic environment.
Weird shit happens all the time, but that doesn't mean it's a miraculous event from the Power of God
I agree with this.
No study has ever demonstrated miracle healings working.
What exactly qualifies as "miraculous healings"? Do studies showing that prayer seems to expedite healing count? Spontaneous remission of cancer? Regrown arm?
There's a million dollar prize by James Randi for a demonstration of any occult power under laboratory conditions.
No there is not, but you should also understand the difference between alleged miracles and occult power.
There are tons of religious hospitals, why don't they have a track record of better outcomes than the secular ones?
Are you unfamiliar with the research showing the positive connection between spirituality and good health outcomes?
Anyone who could actually demonstrate a new power of healing or prediction or weather control would become immensely famous and presumably very wealthy.
Miracles are not the same thing as superpowers. The debunking of a claim to be able to work miracles cannot prove that miracles do not occur (and, similarly, proof of a miracle would not be evidence of superpowers.)
People used to take pictures of UFOs. They weren't really aliens.
Yes, UFOs =! aliens. In fact, many of the leading "UFOlogists" think that UFOs aren't really aliens.
Yet the evidence never seems to get better.
What's your objective metric for this claim?
Note that some portion of UFO claims were in fact US military aircraft, so it's really ironic you bring that up.
Yes, I am aware. In fact a certain portion of the UFO phenomena may be cultivated by the US government precisely to hide advanced aircraft.
If aliens were such advanced fucking space creatures capable of spaceflight then presumably they'd be even more impossible to detect than NGAD if they so chose.
Then why did you make this argument at all?
If there were something really there, at some point we'd expect strong evidence to emerge. People are certainly highly motivated to look.
This is also true of next-generation aircraft.
Shrike
4d ago
That's not what I recall from my reading on the topic, or - to be clearer - at least not in the Anglo tradition. I'd be very interested in contrary sources!
Shrike
4d ago
I suspect Orthodoxy is in the unenviable position, though basically no fault of its own, of attracting a certain type of person who thinks that their youth pastor and Pope Francis were both not hardcore enough.
Shrike
4d ago
Historically wasn't the median age gap for first-marriage something like a few years, though? I'm not aware of any era where the historical norm was, like, 19 for women but 27 for men.
Shrike
4d ago
Articles like this can be really interesting windows into small subcommunities, but they aren't really a replacement for broader data, which does show that faithful religious attendance does correlate with a lot of modernity-resistant behaviors. (For instance, Haidt found that practicing religious teens handled the onset of smart phones well compared to irreligious ones, even if they were still negatively affected.) So reading this and drawing the conclusion that religion doesn't in fact have good effects that protect against modernity is wrong.
I don't think it's all that original of an insight to say that in real life the modernity-resisting "trad wives" aren't wearing long dresses and posting shots of themselves in fields on social media, right now if they aren't asleep, they are probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt and cleaning up some sort of bodily excrement or cooking food. They may not conceive of themselves as "trad wives" at all, they go to an nondenominational, Baptist, or Catholic church and probably not a particularly "trad' one, listen to podcasts and contemporary music, have an iPhone, enjoy watching Marvel movies, and probably do not live on a farm. They might not particularly feel like they are winning the battle against modernity now, but over the long run they are having more kids, longer, happier marriages, and a more satisfying life precisely because they aren't posting glamor shots or snippy Substack posts.
However, I do think this post highlights a potentially real problem: people turning to "trad Christianity" (or any other religious practice) because they want to post about it on Twitter or Substack or because they want to find a hot wife/tolerable husband and not because it's true, looking to get something out of it for themselves first, probably aren't going to find what they are looking for, and they're likely going to undermine whatever community they are going to be a part of. I'm not saying religious groups can't work with these types: they can and they should. But it makes one wonder if the future of religion is more gatekeeping, not less.
Shrike
4d ago
This doesn't necessarily mean that "traditionalism" isn't a viable solution for individuals, only that it doesn't scale. (Of course the reason Amish/ultra-orthodox isn't a viable solution for most individuals is that part of the trad solution of both groups is insularism.)
Shrike
4d ago
In contrast, no religious believer has done a very good job of getting a miracle recorded, or proving faith healing works. Some religions believe their priests have the Power of God, but they can't seem to demonstrate it.
Can you link me to your past examination of medical investigations of alleged miracles demonstrating where they break down?
There's the same documentation problem for UFOs and Bigfoot: high resolution cameras are in everyone's pocket for a decade+ now and yet we don't see increasing evidence.
As I've pointed out to other people on here, we know that certain aircraft (like the NGAD demonstrator) have flown but have never had a high-resolution picture taken and publicized. Do you also disbelieve in the NGAD, or do you concede that it's possible for aircraft to fly without being detected by cell phone cameras? If the latter, why are you making this argument as pertains to UFOs? (I think it's a better argument as regards Bigfoot.)
Shrike
5d ago
Doesn't it alternatively suggest that supernatural phenomena are real and universal?
That's something that many, perhaps most, religions would agree with (i.e. it doesn't invalidate or privilege any specific religion.)
Shrike
6d ago
Speaking very generally, as the rate of fire of a firearm increases you quickly hit diminishing returns and then get into negative gains.
Shrike
8d ago
Maintaining a broad right to keep firearms in your own home, but restricting your ability to carry them in everyday life, seems potentially in the spirit of the Second Amendment if you understand it in terms of a people's insurance against tyranny.
In the Second Amendment the two rights ("to keep and bear arms") are listed together.
Shrike
10d ago
So yes, they're dangerous enough that you'd want to grow, and a sufficiently advanced civilization can also harden itself. Both can be true.
But there's no evidence that hardening against RKVs requires K2 levels of energy. If the Sierra Club's lawsuit against the Dyson sphere succeeds, we're not doomed to be struck by RKVs. Furthermore, as discussed previously (and also below) a Dyson sphere isn't even the best method of energy collection.
It's worse than trying to blow up an asteroid with a nuke, because the debris cone can do nearly as much damage as the intact projectile.
If you are really worried about this, you can use a laser or similar system to ablate them so you can move them off-course in a predictable way.
A Dyson swarm has to dump waste heat somewhere.
Yes, and from what I understand, it is also unstable if sufficiently dense.
That is a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason.
This also describes a Dyson swarm to begin with. If you're going to go to a ridiculous amount of engineering effort, for not very good reason, you may as well keep going!
GAH only needs one civilization, anywhere, in the entire history of the observable universe, to launch them.
No it doesn't. Self-replicating devices with short doubling times already exist, but they have not eaten the observable universe despite trying. In addition, plenty of things with (probably) much lower floors for "happening" haven't happened.
But what would I actually do? Walk there. It's 10 seconds away.
Notice that you employ this argument selectively: civilizations will build Dyson swarms because it's the best idea, but launch VNRs even though it's a TERRIBLE idea. But maybe we live in a universe where the opposite happens: civilization don't launch VNRs because it's a bad idea but they don't make Dyson swarms, either, even though it's a good one.
The strength of GAH is that the absence of the signatures it predicts genuinely is strong evidence, because the assumption set is minimal. All you need is: STL interstellar travel is possible, and at least some civilizations will use available resources over geological timescales. That's it.
For the GAH to tell us anything about the universe, it specifically requires assuming that technological progress will arrive at "can build Dyson swarms" and stop there. If it turns out that the most efficient way to harvest energy is by the care and feeding of your own black hole then we'd never notice the stars being blotted out.
And yeah, I'd bet that the black hole is actually preferred by truly advanced civilizations:
- you're not stuck to a star (it's mobile)
- inherently scalable
- occasional lawsuits from the bereaved kin of the sphagettified will not fail as a business strategy, whereas the environmental lawsuits from darkening the sun will not
- much more efficient energy extraction process
So yeah, if we just assume advanced aliens prefer to use more efficient energy gathering methods then we won't observe them (or at least not by looking for stars being eaten). Waste heat isn't hard to move around (or put to work) so I am not sure we'd see that, or even know if we did see it (my understanding is that there are plenty of odd IR signatures in space.)
Now, maybe it turns out that artificial black holes are ~impossible to create (right now our estimates are that creating one artificially would be extremely difficult) but if it's doable then you would expect that to be preferred.
The fewer joint assumptions, the better the explanation, and "no one is here yet" is just the cheapest fit.
I tend to agree that it's the cheapest fit, I just don't find the GAH very persuasive, because it seems to me there is a lot of uncertainty around it, and from what I can tell about our own future trajectory as a species, we are not on the path to creating the technosignatures in question.
Shrike
10d ago
It was more like 4 or 5, wasn't it? 2 tankers, 2 or 3 destroyers?
All Operation Project Freedom proved is that they won't be able to get the 1600 ships that remain stuck in the gulf out before Trump's term ends at this pace
This does seem unlikely, but the incentive structure that seems to be forming (ships not participating in the scheme get hit) would work to Trump's favor, if Operation Project Freedom was something we were doing, which it isn't, unless of course it is (I dunno I haven't checked the news this afternoon).
In other words, the only thing likely to get the strait open is an end to the war.
Fundamentally I think this is correct. But it does appear that the US has a substantial military ability to protect tankers going through the strait. And there were, as I seem to recall on earlier Iran threads, strong suggestions otherwise. So I think it's interesting, both militarily and from the perspective that it theoretically allows the US to, however marginally, ease the constraints on them, while maintaining the constraints placed on Iran.
Shrike
11d ago
Worth noting that the Namu, as I understand it, had been in the Gulf since the start of the war and was not attempting to transit the straight under US protection when it was hit. Apparently was instead anchored offshore when it was struck. It also doesn't seem clear that Iran actually hit it (at least intentionally – apparently they denied the claim they had attacked it.)
Actually, early Christian apologists explicitly acknowledged pagan miracles. Interestingly, there is also some evidence that these miracles (in the world of the first century church) ceased, as Christian apologists reference this.
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