ArbitraryValue

My guess is that they didn't answer your question because they had strict instructions not to stray from the script on this topic. Saying the wrong thing could lead to a big PR problem, so I don't expect that people working in this field would be willing to have a candid public discussion even about topics to which they have given a lot of thought. I do expect that they have given the ability of AI to obey orders accurately a lot of thought at least due to practical (if not ethical) concerns.

I mean, I am currently willing to say "the AIs will almost definitely kill civilians but we should build them anyway" because I don't work in defense. However, even I'm a little nervous saying that because one day I might want to. My friends who do work in defense have told me that the people who gave them clearance did investigate their online presence. (My background is in computational biochemistry but I look at what's going on in AI and I feel like nothing else is important in comparison.)

As for cold comfort: I think autonomous weapons are inevitable in the same way that the atom bomb was inevitable. Even if no one wants to see it used, everyone wants to have it because enemies will. However, I don't see a present need for strategic (as opposed to tactical) automation. A computer would have an advantage in battlefield control but strategy takes hours or days or years and so a human's more reliable ability to reason would be more important in that domain.

Once a computer can reason better than a human can, that's the end of the world as we know it. It's also inevitable like the atom bomb.

I'm not saying they aren't intended to be used in combat. Of course they (or more sophisticated future robots for which they are the prototypes) are. I'm saying that they're not being used in combat right now.

a full-scale total war in the middle east, possibly even beyond that

Who else would enter the war on Iran's side? It doesn't have any powerful allies among the other Middle Eastern countries, which rightly perceive it as an ideological rival and a would-be regional hegemon, and its proxies appear to be doing as much as they can already.

I think Iran is vulnerable because it overplayed its hand. Thus a war now may be better than dealing with Iran as a nuclear power later.

Despite media speculation, Israel is not currently planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat. Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.

I wonder what the strategy here is, given that the USA also wants to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Is the implication here that the USA will not enable an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as long as Iran doesn't actually try to build a bomb? How confident are Israel and the USA that Iran can't build a bomb in secret? Is there a way Iran could retaliate against an attack on its nuclear facilities but not against an attack on other major targets?

a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, armed with what appears to be an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on rotating turret undergoing "rehearsals" at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia

They're not being used in combat.

With that aside, I appear to be the only one here who thinks this is a great idea. AI can make mistakes, but the goal isn't perfection. It's just to make fewer mistakes than a human soldier does. (Or at least fewer mistakes than a bomb does, which is really easy.)

Plus, automation can address the problem Western countries have with unconventional warfare, which is that Western armies are much less willing to have soldiers die than their opponents are. Sufficiently determined guerrillas who can tolerate high losses can inflict slow but steady losses on Western armies until the Western will to fight is exhausted. If robots can take the place of human infantry, the advantage shifts back from guerrillas to countries with high-tech manufacturing capability.

Doing things like this when you're certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on...

You're right. I stand corrected.

~~Those don't look like garlic flowers to me.~~

How do most people in Iran and among its allies perceive it? As a show of force or as a failure? (How did they perceive the similar April attack?)

The IDF is saying no Israelis were wounded. I'm seeing reports of explosions in populated areas, but the people there would have had time to get to shelters. I'm hoping that this has been like the April attack, but I think we can't know with confidence until enough time has passed to see the full picture.

Well shit. Unless there has been another miracle interception, things are going to get a lot worse now.

Are you implying that Israel’s much greater number of attacks are because they are doing really tiny attacks or something?

No, I'm just saying the graph is probably useless. Israel definitely is launching more and larger attacks, because that's how you win a war. Ideally Hezbollah would be launching zero attacks because Israel launched the massive number of attacks necessary to cripple Hezbollah. A little red bar, then a big blue bar, and finally no red bar at all.

Israel is doing bigger strikes with less concern for civilian casualties.

Is this a joke? Hezbollah usually attacks with unguided rockets. This demonstrates zero concern for civilian casualties. Less than zero, actually, because the intent of the attacks is to cause civilian casualties. Relatively few Israeli civilians have died because Israel is successfully defending them, not because Hezbollah's policy regarding Israeli civilians is different from that of Hamas.

A cease fire in Gaza would achieve this.

Even if that is true (and it would only be true in the short term) then Israel would still be foolish to make major concessions to its persistent enemies when it has the military power necessary not to. Meanwhile Hezbollah would be more inclined to launch future attacks because it would see that they worked.