Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/03/treasure-vs-blood.html
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Kott proposes that active-defense software will be common – that is, software that detects other software trying to compromise it and strikes back by attempting to compromise the enemy’s automatic systems.
So… black ICE?
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IoT with nukes. What could possibly go wrong?
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I am reminded of this passage from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age:
A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders.
http://index-of.co.uk/Tutorials-2/Stephenson,_Neal_-_Diamond_Age,_The.pdf
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Why, nothing whatsoever. Nothing to see here. These aren’t the killer robots you’re looking for. Move along.
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““ [you] will regard [it] not only with respect and awe… but with love…”
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The cookie cutters were particularly diabolical.
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The platoon was pinned down by spam, awaiting Low-Orbit Ion Cannon counter-fire, hopefully before the day-zeros made their attack run.
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See Future Combat Systems. FAIL.
Counting down to Colossus: the Forbin Project in three, two, one …
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[you] will regard [it] not only with respect and awe… but with love…
Quote from Colossus: the Forbin Project, if I’m not mistaken. (I posted a YouTube clip from Colossus just minutes ago, elsewhere in this thread.)
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“What’s more, a battle that kills a bunch of expensive robots is a profit-center for the company that replaces those robots for the next battle, producing excess capital that can be used to lobby for more battles and more wars and more blown up robots and more purchase orders for robots to replace them.”
I may be way too optimistic, but I can’t see that scenario sustaining itself. War industry profits come from taxes, and only the relatively few would see those profits. Everyone else (typical taxpayers) would end up with less and less (given the post’s bootstrap scenario) in terms of tax-funded services and they would know it. Lobby $$$ can buy Congress (and, these days, the Oval Office), but they can’t buy and own public support over the long-term, and this is where a very angry and very incentivized electorate can make changes.
This is where corruption comes in. Corruption thrives where there are concentrated gains and diffuse losses. The total losses may vastly exceed the gains, but any one individual’s losses are dwarfed by the gains to the corrupt.
Think of pollution: the gains to me from not treating my effluent are in the millions; the cost to the millions downstream from me are a few dollars a month for increased municipal filtration. When a law comes up proposing that I stop my pollution, I have millions to lose, while any voter only stands to gain a few dollars. I can afford to fight much harder than they can.
Corruption is solved through collective action: when the cost of organizing the losers in a corrupt system drops to a threshold that leaves sufficient capital to effectively counter corruption’s winners, corruption stops.
US military spending is crazily corrupt. US military spending dwarfs every other country – per capita, total, any way you slice it. The DoD’s own figures revealed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud:
There is SO MUCH money available to corrupt military contractors that they have TONS left over to spend lobbying for more money. The biggest threat they face is not the monetary losses sustained by taxpayers, but blood shed – people will fight hard to end wars that threaten the lives of their children.
Taking the humans out of the American side of warfighting removes the single biggest check on corrupt military spending.
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What is Afghanistan?
Worse than that, we have an Adminstration that is actively undermining posse commitatus (the law that keeps the military out of domestic affairs). If the trend continues, we may see an insurgency break out on American soil, with the first targets being “terrorists” but the scope widening to encircle the marginalized of our society, then the poor citizenry, then everybody else. Logic of Oligarchy.
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One of the biggest costs in any organisation is wages. The US military employs 1.25M personnel. Assume … 10% can be dropped from the payroll by using killbots in their stead (see, for an actual example, the falling number of sailors required to drive a ship with each succeeding generation of capability). So, that’s 125,000 pers times an average salary of $100k, or $12.5B that can be spent on new or replacement killbots, every year, without changing the defence budget at all.
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A profit center, in this narrative.
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