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Comment Re:They're already here (Score 1) 131

In the case of Ukraine, the success rate is very high because anybody in range is likely an enemy soldier.

Israel's success rate may be as low as 0.1%. That tells us that robots can't tell civilians from military. A large enough stockpile of human shields would be a serious problem.

And we know drones et al are vulnerable to GPS spoof attacks, making such an attack risky against a technologically advanced enemy with intellectuals and engineers forming a scientific take on special forces.

Comment Re:As A Citizen Of A Threatened Country (Score 1) 131

Why bother with a missile? You're here, so a geek. You know GPS jamming is effective, as is GPS spoofing. All you need is a parabolic dish and a high power transmitter. There's simply no possibility of a wide-angle transmitter on a satellite matching a narrow beam that's broadcast from a hundredth of the distance. Sure, there'll be authentication keys. And social engineers have compromised most of the world's governments, which means the keys will be for sale somewhere.

The only way I can the robot army being effective is if they flatten everything at long range, indiscriminately. And that is going to cause its own problems. Especially if the software gets hacked prior to install. Which will happen, because hiring and training an army of hackers in Mitnick-style social engineering tactics costs a tiny, tiny fraction of the expense of maintaining a wall of tactical nukes that can EMP the robot forces.

Comment Re:Impossible (Score 1) 131

The robots work OK, but the AI doesn't. Israel is using AI extensively to target Hamas at the moment, with the very best AI that exists and the very best military minds the world can produce. The success rate is somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

Comment Re:Friend or foe? (Score 1) 131

Face scanning tech also depends on the data set being valid. The DOD has been compromised many times by airwall violations, security violations, improper screening, and extremely buggy software from Cisco and Microsoft.

All the enemy needs to do is write a rootkit that flips a couple of bits. The robot army now faces the other way and friends are identified as foe. I wouldn't put it past a group like the Lazarus hackers to be capable of such a stunt. We already know the enemy is capable of GPS jamming and GPS spoofing, because they've done so to hijack US drones, and that's another potential vulnerability.

US military robots are also known to have severe problems identifying that a person dressed as a tree is a person, not a tree. A skillful enemy could walk through US robot army lines without impediment, unless the US robots shoot indiscriminately. But if the US robots are genocidal, mutually assured destruction becomes a viable tactic. You can't be more than dead, after all.

And if the US includes a death switch, given that US defence contractors don't always wipe hard drives and the military don't psychologically screen very well (Manning was known to be seriously mentally unstable prior to deployment, for example), there's absolutely no guarantee the enemy won't simply learn it and spoof it.

I just don't see how the US think this could possibly work.

Comment Re:let's play global thermonuclear war! (Score 1) 131

Its success rate in Israel stands at somewhere between 1% and 0.1%.

One gun can shoot at one target at any one time. If your AI-guided robot army is shooting up chicken farmers and goat herders, it's ergo not shooting at the army that's flanked it which threatens to overrun the opposing side's now largely undefended turf.

A robot army can also be taken out by EMP weapons - basically tax nukes. Since robots can't distinguish between soldiers, civilians, and cake stands (AI is pretty dumb), the defending side already faces complete genocide. You can't get any deader than that, so there's no incentive to not flatten the enemy with nukes and a very slim chance they won't fire back, because it's hard to maintain an expensive nuclear defence and an extremely expensive robot army at the same time.

(Basically, same reason the US is now outgunned on fighters, the new ones are so expensive they can't afford that many. The US relies utterly on them being more destructive faster, but again, what's the point in NOT invoking MAD when your enemy has demonstrated they're genocidal and no respectors of the norms and laws of war?)

Comment Re:27" iMac ? (Score 1) 107

I think Apple doesn't understand what it had with the big iMac.

I still have my 2017 one around. When it came out, it was revolutionary. A full 5K display with a reasonable CPU and GPU at a very reasonable price. Built-in webcam and speakers. The only necessary cable was power (if you went bluetooth keyboard and mouse). A wonderfully uncluttered desktop with a mean machine that also looks nice.

Why would I make many steps back from that?

I've done the math last year. I also thought Mac mini + Studio Display (it's not that much more expensive than a good 4K display) would do it, but it turns out that once you upgrade the Mac mini to something actually useable for desktop work, you're not that far from a Studio price-wise.

I really, really, really wish someone took a big fence post and hammered some sense into the idiots at Apple.

I wish that monitor vendors would figure out a good way of mounting small-form computers (like the Mac mini) on the back of monitors...

They have. I've seen such in several different offices.

Comment Totally anecdotal (Score 2) 84

Standardized tests can benefit minorities.

One of my online friends is non-white and immigrated to Australia as a child. She had a thick accent and racist teachers labeled her stupid.

Then one day she had the chance to take a standardized test. Her very high intelligence showed, and she got tracked into a selective school and moved into a high-paying career.

Comment Re:Just let them use AI (Score 2) 115

I don't think that the point of writing assignments is to produce documents as a product. It's to have the student go through the process of gathering, analyzing and understanding the material, in order for them to learn it. If they skip that work, they learn little or nothing.

In the real world, being effective in directing a computer to produce a bunch of text that you know nothing about is not a worthwhile skill. If someone comes back with issues related to the AI-generated content, how would you address the problems if you're mostly ignorant about the topic at hand?

Comment "scaling down" (Score 2, Funny) 199

Reducing something to just over 1 % of its original planned size isn't "scaling down". That's an euphemism for "giving up, just finishing the stuff we've already largely built".

Converted to your typical house, it means instead of building the whole house you're building the tiny guest toilet and nothing else.

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