[MertsA]

From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of.

We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?

[dragontamer]

> From a pure cold war mentality AI is absolutely terrifying to me. We're right in the uncanny valley where AI for weapons systems is starting to get to the point where it can feasibly make human soldiers in some positions obsolete. Why do we want fighter pilots when AI can vastly outperform a human? AI doesn't break a sweat in extremely long mission durations, AI doesn't need a massive heavy cockpit and canopy to fly the plane, AI doesn't pass out at high G loads and can take negative Gs and lateral Gs just fine. AI can push jets right to the brink of what the airframe is capable of.

Yeah, that's why our plane systems are being designed as such.

We don't call "AI Fighters" "AI Fighters". We call them surface-to-air missiles, air-to-air missiles, and drones. For the case where a human needs to be close to support our "AIs" (aka: missiles and drones), we're creating F35 as nearby stealth supporter. Thats why the F35 isn't good at dogfights, its assumed that drones / missiles will take care of that sort of stuff in the future.

The dogfight race has been lost to air-to-air missiles. Humans can't take the kinds of Gs that a missile can do, you can't outrun something like that in a "fair" circumstance (outside of Blackbird-style "too high / too fast" situations).

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> We already have drones that have dramatically lowered the costs of waging war. We don't need to put boots on the ground in a lot of cases where drone strikes are feasible. What happens when it's not just a reaper and we can put tanks and guns on the ground while only putting actual soldiers inside of some small maintenance and supply base to support the machines that are actually on the front lines? Would the American people care even less than they already do about e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan?

It seems odd to say that war requires human cost in order to be important. Perhaps the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were considered failures not because of their (relatively low) human costs, but because the politics didn't work out in their favor.

[roenxi]

The US has basically 2 geopolitical threats - the EU and China. Destabilising the middle east might have inconvenienced them and denied access to the oil reserves there.

Apart from that silver lining, the US's adventures in that region have been expensive failures that have presumably spawned a generation of hatred and fear, and provided a cover of distraction from issues that might actually matter (like dealing with a debt burden that is on par with the World-War II response, or the dissolution of civil liberties in response to a threat that was extremely mild by-the-numbers). And the sheer futility and pointlessness of all the death, maiming and redrawing of maps is just breathtaking.

Imagine a world where political issues were dealt with starting with the largest and working to smallest. In this world, every debate would be mentioning the fact that entire countries are being persecuted for no particular gain. Mysteriously, this issue is not one of the most hotly debated issues (although it does get attention). Eg, when Trump talked about withdrawing the last few troops from Syria that was considered controversial. Would that more important people had courted more controversy before Afghanistan and Iraq.

All that is the long into to the point: I think GP meant that more American voters need to be exposed to war to generate the appropriate political response. The whole last 20 years of American military action turned out to be no-brainer bad ideas and people are still acting like they were defensible in some sense. The major anti-war voice in the Democrat primaries seems to be a veteran, which suggests that exposure to the situation on the ground helps form anti-war sentiment. If everything is automated, more idiots will think that the last 20 years of military activity are somehow appropriate and not crazy and less sane people will have the needed exposure to argue with them.

[thephyber]

Your examples aren't arguing AI, they are arguing software.

> Would the American people care even less than they already do

I don't think that's as much about the advancement of technology so fewer civilians know/think about the war. I think more the psychological component of the military (propaganda/PR, crafting messaging and wording that legislators use, choice to assist movies which glorify the US military or not assist those which are critical, choice not to publish images of US coffins in Dover[1]) and how politicians and media symbiotically weaponize the "us versus them" to drum up support, FUD, and urgency for non-necessary "wars" (in quotes because we haven't declared war since WW2... Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq 1, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, et al were "police action"s or military "use of force" actions -- which further proves my point).

I think we need to make parents sign their daughters up for "Selective Service" (again with the propagandized terminology) if the ultimate goal is to get voting civilians to care about ending unnecessary wars.

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101137...