This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.
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.
Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?
They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against 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, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.
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.
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 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.
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.
It's for backup. Even in the article's first paragraphs it says this
So not used often and when it is used it's been for very tiny things instead of needing constant human attention like driving normally does.
So yeah autonomous drones will hopefully have some human oversight still. I don't want kill bots without any way to overrule them. But yes self driving cars are replacing the need for humans to drive.
We are not at Killbots yet, but we are approaching. 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.
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.
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.
Humans can also not operate without human intervention, and unlike us, these machines are only getting better and better. What will self driving navigation be like in five years? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Maybe with very very minimal human input, one guy whose job is to sit in a room and two times a day he has to look up cause the screens beep at him that one in the millions (or billions?) of cars can't tell if that weird fuzzy light in the sky is a red light. Not that it really matters too much anyway, making a trivial mistake like that doesn't cause anyone to die, traffic accidents are just a vague memory. It just gives the dude in the car a minor annouance cause his trip is 9.5 minutes instead of 9.3. Except of course it might not be one guy, it might just be Claude.
And we've never had it like we do today. And we've never had it like we will in the upcoming decades.
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.
Sure.
Maybe.
Marginally, and even a lot of those are from new technology
That's true, but it's still just because of technology and has nothing to do with "evolutionary warrior ability" or whatever. This is even true of older tech that has been around for a long while. Like I've said elsewhere if you're up against a lion would you rather be an unarmed man or a woman with a loaded full auto rifle and firearms training? It's already been equalizing to some degree thanks to tech.
And then on top of that, would you rather go up against the lion with a rifle or with a tank? How about with a fighter jet? Or a drone thousands of miles away? The lion is an even more "evolved to be a warrior" physical fighter than us humans, and yet it doesn't even have a chance. Technology does not just equalize our biology, it has already surpassed it decades if not centuries ago.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link