51–55 of 55 posts
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the main question of course being, aren't we anthropomorphizing ourselves too much ?
When people say this kind of stuff, I wonder whether there might not be philosophical zombies among us.
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This completely misses the point. The problem isn't that people do worse, but that automating warfare changes the cost function. Technologically superior and determined enemies can still be dissuaded by incurring significant numbers of casualties or losses to their infrastructure. A small number of casualties stiffens resolve, a large number of casualties or a never ending trickle of them eventually breaks or wears i…
You left out the bit where the various superpowers inevitably have to try using the shiny new technology against their rivals because it's never been tried so we can't be certain it's a bad idea. That's the bit that worries me the most - I'd rather do without a rerun of World War 1. > it's more important to assess the impact of this emerging force multiplier and develop countermeasures What is there to do other than…
In a more general sense, the solution to an elevated attack is not always a retaliatory attack, but perhaps a better defense that neutralizes it. Helmets can be used as weapons, but their primary purpose is to make weapons less effective and change the strategic calculus - now the enemy gets lesser results for the same effort, and either gives up or tires out and can be defeated with a smaller retaliation. In general, defense is thought to be somewhat stronger than offense, which is why surprise is so important. Technological edges tend to be negated over time.
Deeply understanding this takes a long time and a lot of study. Military science is a difficult but interesting subject, and tips over into systems theory.
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Don't worry about it. We can already do far worse using either humans or land mines or nuclear bombs or whatever. People are the real danger.
This completely misses the point. The problem isn't that people do worse, but that automating warfare changes the cost function. Technologically superior and determined enemies can still be dissuaded by incurring significant numbers of casualties or losses to their infrastructure. A small number of casualties stiffens resolve, a large number of casualties or a never ending trickle of them eventually breaks or wears i…
You mention attacks against a technologically advanced power (does an "enemy" become a "power" when it's a friend?), but obviously those powers will find ways to defend against them. Maybe it's just in the form of slightly more advanced "washing machines".
This fear thinking seems to come from assuming no secondary advancements occur. Suddenly robot soldiers are cheaply available and nobody develops any defense against them, either political or technological.
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It's proven that if you want polynomial sample complexity in the size of the state space you need directed exploration. The algorithms 'flail' because they are initialized with random policies.
Couldn't any directed exploration also be produced as the result of random flailing? Or is this average sample complexity?
So it's a worst case result with respect to the MDP, but expected time/high probability with wrt random chance.