I'm not sure in which direction, though. On the one hand, medical researchers are enlisting AI in the task of finding a vaccine for COVID, on the other hand, medical researchers are enlisting AI in the task of finding a better toxin to kill humans.
Let me start at the hardware level - we can see what differences just tech can make in balances of power shall we?
Ukraine are successful at repelling the Russians from target after target because they're well versed in using technology. They use social media to drive public perception and reaction, they used the warfare equivalent of the Spirit and Opportunity
Mars rovers - inexpensive strike drones (
Bayraktar TB-2) that are extremely effective loiter munitions. And they used off the shelf drones for surveillance, target acquisition and targeting.
Ukraine and Russia are what we'd call state actors. And yes, technology has radically changed the balance between them. Ukraine has been holding Russia back because Russia has relied on what may have seemed to be pretty high tech but is also older, quite expensive and difficult to maintain, and used it using dated procedures. Their gear costs . . .
Ukraine has opted for the throwaway tech and used it skilfully because they are defending themselves.
(Wisdom from my father: "When a tiger attacks another tiger, he must attack and he has to win. The tiger defending needs only to survive.")
In order to do that they've been aided by other state actors (Turkey, for instance, providing and selling TB2s, other countries providing directly or providing finance for purchasing equipment, munitions, and weapons) who are technically not involved in the war. But they have also had aid from some decidedly not state actors.
If Elon Musk can
change the course of the Ukraine-Russia war with his Starlink donation, that means he has more power than Russia because he was able to provide Ukraine with communications that Russia will find very hard to block.
If a Taiwanese company can
supply high value camera drones to Zelesnkiy then they too are helping win a war because their gift directly allows Ukraine defenders to conduct covert and hard to stop aerial surveillance, it allows them to provide targeting information to artillery, and it provides live proof of destroying the target.
Freelance mercenaries (
the very word "freelance" has military origins) flocked into Lviv and other cities to join the Ukraine fighters. These have had to be equipped with weapons and transport, etc. That has to a large part come from yet other non-state and state actors.
All of these things are making a very large difference to what might have been seen as a very one-sided war. The latter benefactors who are joining the fray aren't State actors, and while Russia can threaten other countries (that join the military of the Ukraine to fight the Russian military) with retaliation, it can't do the same to these other participants.
Where do you aim a missile to take out the origins of a bunch of mercenaries? What of Musk's properties can you attack? Which people in Taiwan do you send a bunch of soldiers to drag out of their homes and execute? How do you "get" an enemy on foreign soil without declaring war on the countries they reside in and over-committing your armed forces and finances?
Guerilla war and terrorism rely on this shadowiness. Now Great Britan have made donations of equipment and funding to Ukraine. Germany are re-arming themselves, Finland and Norway are mooting joining NATO, China and Afghanistan aren't offering as much assistance as Putin had hoped for, and just where does Putin send troops and aim airstrikes to counter that?
(BTW the reasons the Chinese aren't as overtly forthcoming is that they have a financial crisis, they have a worldwide image problem, and they need overseas customers. Also, they've managed a lot of their population problems.)
Technology has given an edge to militaries that use it. That's why there have been literally trillions of dollars poured into research and development for military equipment ordnance and materiel. It's resulted in super-effective (but also super-expensive) military tech. Then that super-expensive tech found its way into commercial technology and became super-cheap tech.
And what we know is that if you make it super cheap and available to anyone, then everyone will mess with it. We're a race born to tinker, we use tools - and that includes once super-expensive, now super-cheap tech. Among other things that's given us computing power unlike anything seen on Earth a mere hundred years ago, when the tag "supercomputer" began to be applied to the biggest computers of the day. They were super for their time but nowadays you probably have a much better computer in your pocket or are reading this article on it.
But as soon as they existed, those early computers became bigger better tools. . . In the 1970s the Cray-1 came along, followed about five years later by the Cray X-MP in the early1980s. Then sometime in the early 1990s the first massively superparallel computers came along, and today we take them and the massive server farms for granted.
And of course, they're now the tools that are being used to create the AI and ML (Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning) software we have and which will generate ever better AI/ML. And yes, the AI strides we're now making can be put to a multitude of uses.
So now that we've got that technological angle covered let's get back to AI. . .
AI War
AIs are something that we needn't be afraid of. It's more technology, another tool we can use.
But the people that develop those AIs - them I've got issues with...
Cyber attacks are at the moment carried out by hackers. Lone wolf hackers generally don't manage large scale hacks. Hacker collectives can be much more successful at larger scales but they go after targets dictated almost by whim and social media, so to speak.
The so-called state actors are a different matter. Countries usually keep a team - a farm if you will - of what we should probably call "their IT people" for political correctness and they are then tasked with hacking other states' critical IT infrastructure and gaining sensitive information. War is where the tech came from, after all, and war is a legit hothouse incubator of technological advances as we saw in the last section.
And so you can bet at least one of those cyberwar groups are looking at AI as a new and powerful tool in the fight. As an ex system and network admin, I can think of a dozen things I could point a machine learning / neural network box at.
I'm sure a hacker in a cyberwar/espionage unit can, too. And they'll have access to good AI software and hardware if they ask for it.
Lone wolves and collectives would first have to hire or hack a powerful computer system before they could even run such a program. State employed cyberwarfare teams on the other hand can generally just ask for stuff and be given access.
AIs and technology go hand in hand, you can have technology without AI but AI is dependent on the right strength of tech to run on. And between them, technology and AI software have already changed the face of warfare and commerce and transport logistics and store management and airline bookings and.... You get the idea.
It hasn't escaped the militaries of the world, the governments of the world. China has a very good handle on 'managing' their entire population by surveillance technology, AI facial recognition technology, and so-called 'social credit'.
If you're a naughty citizen they can find you in less than seven minutes because of their facial recognition software and the largest smart surveillance camera network in the world.
If you're not naughty enough to be arrested, you may find that trains won't let you board, and some stores will no longer take your card, you could lose your job - or your lease on your apartment.
----------------
Meanwhile robotic platforms like Bayraktar, Big Dog and Atlas, and countless other robotic machines are being equipped with smarter and smarter AI, enabling those machines to decide for themselves if a certain person is an ally, a non-combatant, or an opponent. The only thing stopping that happening already are 'morals' and 'war conventions'. We are so screwed... Unless:
My Great Look Forward
Disclaimer: Includes utopian trippy-dippy-hippie thinking.
Boots-on-the-ground wars are becoming a thing for underdeveloped countries. (Both in terms of resources, and in terms of humanity and intellectual advancement. Russia isn't out of that group yet, obviously.) Developed countries send AI-directed machines, and the next generation won't even need those, because it's becoming pretty obvious that wars achieve nothing that a sufficiently robust balance of trade and economics agreement can't do.
I'm not sure how long it'll take people to realise that we can pretty much become Earthlings instead of sticking to our ethnoreligiogeopolitical divisions, because let's face it we've proven that none of those have proven useful nor helpful nor harmless.
(I admit, this is a pretty utopian trippy-dippy-hippie proposition but I believe we're watching an intersection. Common forms of politics have all proven disappointing and in fact their badness goes all the way through to actively harmful and catastrophic. Individual country and personal economics systems also haven't proven to actually ensure any minimal quality of life for everyone, and the uses we've been putting technology to have proven to be a disaster of planetary proportions. I think there's every chance that I'll live to see this change happening.)
Thinking: Technology. AI software. Hypersurveillance 'Social credit'.
It's already theoretically possible to - like China - be able to locate any specific individual around the globe in a matter of minutes. There are enough ways to home in and then triangulate. Internet activity IP address, bank and loyalty card transactions, phone signal, phone GPS - these form a search chain that gets successively smaller radii of location.
It's also theoretically possible to give every locatable person a Universal Basic Income in the form of specific tokens: Accommodation tokens, fuel and/or energy tokens, grocery tokens, clothing tokens, entertainment tokens, discretionary spend tokens, etc. The minimum value of those tokens should ensure a liveable life, but not much more.
Social credits would provide the means to upgrade those tokens. Work would provide the means to upgrade those tokens. The whole system will be able to be managed by software and hardly need administering. The question is - will it be dispensed by governments, by corporations, or an AI?
Anyway. Just my humble brainfart. Ciao for now.
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