Monthly Archives: August 2022

Russia and China will be more willing to push the boundaries of AI weaponry, a drone warfare expert claimed in a chilling warning.

Professor Peter Lee, a military drone and automation expert at the University of Portsmouth, has warned that although today's AI weaponry is still a way off the sci-fi films, when it does arrive some countries will likely be prepared to let them run riot more than others.

He says the big question is: "How much permission will you give it to think for itself?"

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Professor Lee said: For example, you cant give a drone full autonomy, I mean absolute human autonomy, because it might decide to change sides.

If something is fully autonomous in theory that is what they can do.

Increasingly autonomous weapons will bring some benefit, but the UKs current position is it will not develop fully autonomous drones.

Autonomous weapons as they are being conceived at the moment are very far short of the science fiction that we see in iRobot and Terminator and similar films.

The expert added that while some aspects of autonomous weaponry are developing faster than others, at some point a difficult decision will need to be made about how much freedom countries give it.

He said: The thing that will be politically controversial, at least in the UK and the West, is what level of autonomy do you give the weapons systems to select its own targets without a human authorising.

At the moment that's not been decided and is still being discussed."

In theory, the more AI makes its own calls the more scope there is for things to go badly wrong, the expert believes.

Professor Lee continued: At some point in the next 10 to 30 years, there will be a divergence between those countries that are willing to allow machines to make more decisions and machines that will be more constrained.

The UK for example would be on the more constrained side because of its international legal commitments, I'm confident of that.

Russia, I am less confident of. China, Im less confident. So those are some of the big challenges."

Discussing why Russia and China might be more prepared to give autonomous weapons more freedom he said: They appear not to be constrained in what they are willing to do.

"Look at Russia, it has bombed a hundred hospitals and military hospitals and medical facilities [in] Ukraine deliberately. You don't hit that many by accident.

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You have to say that is a country that is not very concerned about the well-being of civilians in a war zone.

Therefore when you translate that approach to the use of autonomous weapons it does suggest there will be fewer constraints."

Professor Lee compared it to how eager President Joe Biden was to claim no-one else was killed in the recent assassination of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

He added: If you think about the effort that President Biden went to last night to explain how carefully planned the strike against Zawahiri was not to hit civilians [and] avoid collateral damage you can see politically thats obviously important."

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Russia and China 'prepared to go further' with AI weapons for WW3 advantage, expert says - Daily Star

dimitrig said:

Cal88 said:

sycasey said:

Taiwan is part of China? I think Taiwan might disagree.

There is no official entity called Taiwan, not even on that island itself. That island is the home to the Republic of China, while the mainland is the People's Republic of China. Both governments claim the other party as theirs.

The US and the rest of the international community have also acknowledged the One China policy, and almost all recognize the PRC as "China", because it represents 98.6% of Chinese population and 99.4% of Chinese territory, rather than the 1.4% who live on the small island near the mainland and represent the other political entity.

Whether out of shortsightedness, ignorance or shear exceptionalist arrogance, politicians like Pelosi as well as Rep. chickenhawks in the McCain/Cheney mold have been pushing the ROC to officially relinquish its status and become an independent republic of Taiwan. This is going to automatically trigger the invasion of this island by the PRC, a war where the US will have to be involved more directly than in Ukraine, in a conflict that could easily spiral into WW3.

It's also a war that the PRC has been preparing for for the last several decades, and a war that they will absolutely win, regardless of what it might cost them in human life or economic loss, or how many American aircraft carriers they will have to sink in the process.

So once again, idiots people are leading Taiwan down the primrose path, which would result in them being wrecked. The parallels with Ukraine are striking...

To the extent that anyone can "win" a war between the US and China it wouldn't be China that comes out ahead. Even the Chinese would admit that.

How many wars has China fought lately? I think they will find themselves woefully unprepared compared to the US which has been fighting wars across the globe for the better part of last century and all of this century.

Obviously if there is a "war" between China and Taiwan, China will have its way. And historically China has run wild over its population with reckless disregard and fairly little pushback but a lot has changed in the last few decades. The rise of the Chinese middle class has been incredible and made it harder for the CCP to have its way without worrying about blowback. To be clear, the CCP needs to worry about what Chinese people think about before invading and destroying Taiwan and the US can influence that state of affairs if it should so choose.

This is a good article discussing how things really are.

Quote:

This simplistic view of Chinese public opinion is off base. People in China have diverse and well-formed views on a wide range of public policy issues. Not all citizens are supportive of current government policies, nor do all their views reflect state propaganda. And, despite the risks, they are willing to share their opinions.

By contrast, Pan and Xu's research shows that, on average, wealthier and more educated Chinese are more, not less likely, to hold politically liberal, pro-market, and non-nationalistic views. This is particularly significant at a time when the government is taking an increasingly illiberal, statist, and nationalistic turn. While not a sign that China is on its way to democratization, the data indicate that the party-state must contend with well-formed ideological views among its citizens that diverge with its own and is pursuing policies that face substantial, even if quiet, public opposition.Pan and Xu argue that plenty of Chinese are very patriotic but very few are supportive of war in pursuit of those goals. This is especially true for wealthier, more educated respondents. This finding echoes the results of a survey from two decades ago, which showed that China's emerging middle class was far more internationalist and opposed to militarism than other social groups.

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The Official Russian Invasion of Ukraine Thread - Page 44 - Bear Insider

Nancy Pelosis stopover in Taiwan may be brave or foolhardy, but the Chinese reaction so far (lots of live-fire weapons drills close to the island nation, along with acts of cyber-sabotage) suggests how threatened the government of the Peoples Republic of China feels.

The New York Times columnist Tom Friedman even suggested that her visit could touch off WW3. Its a measure of the strangeness of political face (we denigrate the Chinese preoccupation with face, as if our credibility did not amount to exactly the same thing) when the diplomatic visit of a lone government official can become the kind of spark that the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand played in setting off WW1. But almost any inadvertency could start WW3, because deterrence, to work (until it doesnt work that is) requires hair-trigger preparedness.

Its an outrage, its evil, its incredibly stupid, and it ought to be illegal under international law. Oh, wait a minute, it isillegal under international law. See the Kellogg-Briand pact against war, in force since 1929; the treaty on Nuclear Weapons Proliferation (NPT), in force since 1971; and also the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in the process of being ratified by a majority of the worlds nations and having the force of international law applicable to allsince 22 January 2021.

Democratic nuclear powers rationalize their weapons as good because their governments are representative, but in reality, world-ending weapons are all world-ending, not good nuclear weapons because they are in the hands of good people or bad nuclear weapons because they are in the hands of totalitarian dictators. The catastrophe resulting from escalating into even a limited nuclear war would render such a distinction meaningless.

Nobody, including both the non-democracies and the democracies, wants war. Meanwhile the deterrence system remains a holocaust waiting to happen that would dwarf the Nazi Holocaust. Nuclear policy consists of mulish refusal of nuclear nations to come together in their own self-interest and move beyond obsolete, unworkable games of chicken. All these smart people interested in wielding power seem blind to the reality that it is perfectly feasible technologically to verifiably, reciprocally reduce nuclear weapons to zero, thereby raising humankind's chances of survival considerably.

The merciless and pointless invasion of Ukraine and the equally pointless war China threatens to make on Taiwan (or the second Gulf war for that matter) indicate a profound sickness in power dynamicsthe failure to act upon the truth that we are all in this together on one small planet, and we either are going to destroy everything or learn to get along and save everything. The cries of the hungry and displaced are not cries for trillions of dollars to be spent in endless arms renewal.

President Biden is a good, decent public servant, but he presides over what Elaine Scarry calls a thermonuclear monarchy, identical to the nuclear monarchies of oligarch-dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping.

Where is citizen mobilization around a larger vision of self-interest that would yield servant leadership at the top? Limitless egocentricity insists that the whole nuclear system continue merely for a few men to preserve their power. In the U.S. this egocentricity manifests of course in the phenomenon of Trump, who identifies with dictators and wouldnt mind being one.

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The misunderstanding of power dynamics on the part of these leaders, the utter failure to see past the short-term to the actual state of the Earth at this moment in the great unfolding story of the human experiment, is breathtaking.

Mulishness, even if it is an insult to mules, may be the word to describe this complete misunderstanding, this narrowness of focus on remaining in power at all costs, including the casual willingness to use even nuclear threats in defense of that power. When leaders try to maintain a deterrent system which can fail at any moment for the flimsiest of reasons, the far, far greater power of nuclear weapons is going to inevitably come back to bite us all in our collective butts with its poisonous fangs.

When it comes to the environment, the reality of our oneness as a species has begun to penetrate, but not nearly far enough into the collective soul to make the necessary difference. The ecophilosopher Thomas Berry asserts that this moment on the planet, the radical degradation of our oceans, our air, our soil, along with the rapid extinction of thousands of species of birds and insects and other forms of life, represents the end of the 65 million year period of the Cenozoic, which began with the demise of the dinosaurs.

Our energy as a species must now be focused upon bringing the whole Earth community together into a new moment of creative collaboration, which Berry has called the Ecozoic. That task far transcends the obsolete power dynamics, based in fear, hate and helplessness, that energizes not only the leaders of too many nations but too many of their followers as well.

Ultimately nuclear weapons and environmental disaster represent an identical misunderstanding of our interdependence with each other and the biosystem.

We are, as Berry says, at the end of an old, unworkable story. The new story, whatever form it may take, involves the harnessing of our creative energies in the context of forces infinitely larger and more mysterious than the political ego.

As one example of what might encourage us to move safely into the future, we need look no further than the Webb telescopeto the cooperative spirit displayed by scientists from 14 nations who realized the project. Even more importantly, let us look to the vision the Webb reveals of our place among hundreds of billions of galaxies. We humans are an integral part of 13.85 billion years of creativity. We are the universe looking at itself in wonder. That wonder has the potential to dissolve our obstinate mulishness, re-energizing our politics, our economics, our religious convictions, and our understanding of self-interest.

Crossposted from PeaceVoice

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Beyond the Mulish, Look to the Stars - LA Progressive