The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier in Ukraine is between 20-30 minutes, CIA director John Ratcliffe said. Speaking at a defense summit in Pennsylvania, he attributed the deadly conditions for Vladimir Putin’s forces to Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with AI. “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.” “And that’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines. And it’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added. Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million soldiers since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, with over 1,000 of the Kremlin’s troops killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s defense ministry said it was killing roughly 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory that Moscow claimed.
It’s not just flying drones.
I saw video of Ukraine using three tracked ground drones with machine guns in concert with multiple flying drones used to launch rockets to clear a house.
Russians were firing as they fled, but it literally doesn’t matter if you shoot a land drone, they’re mini tanks.
If/when AI is really running that shit, the oligarchs will stop pretending they think we’re the same species.
Do people realize how fucked we’d be right now if the US army was just machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying?
Even if we had a utopian government guaranteed to always be just, someone could just hack it.
We need to make use/development of AI like this a major war crime while we still can.
Here’s another worry. Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
Going by previous wars over many years some of them will inevitably go down the mercanary route and sell those skills to the highest bidder.
I saw another video of a robot “ultimate fighting league” recently with humanoid bots.
The two clankers went for 100% roundhouse kicks and missed almost everytime, but when they fell down?
It didn’t look real, they were back on their feet perfectly in milliseconds. It was clear the kicks was just the only scripted move, but these bots have picked themselves up off the ground probably millions of times. So that’s the only thing they currently excel at.
Eventually they’re gonna be straight up ninjas.
It’s fucking stupid to wait until we can’t beat them to try and outlaw them. We need to act now before the oligarchs literally have an army of terminators.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
We’re already seeing this technology pop up throughout Iran, across Africa, and among both state and guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific. For all the lauding of Ukraine, the folks who are really making the most of this are Houthis and what’s left of the Wagner Group.
One of the ironies of this conflict is how many of these smaller militias are running circles around Silicon Valley tech firms - your Andurils and Mithrils and Raytheons and Northrop Grummonds. The Pentagon is spending a cool milly a unit to send up Reaper Drones that get knocked out by some particularly clever goat farmers with $200 in parts from Temu and a bootleg Starlink subscription.
Necessity breeds innovation
Greed breeds obsolescence
Restrictions make you creative, money makes you stupid.
Do they realize how fucked they would be if we all agreed to not go to work tomorrow?
Yes, that’s why they’re investing so much into AI. They can’t wait to get rid of us.
to save innocent russian soldiers the tankies will surely accept that a peace deal with ukraine so that nato can take another border country with russia and never invade will be a sensible option
also they have to gtfo of georgia and anywhere else
AI is here to stay. There is no putting that cat back in the bag
We need to stop fucking around with greedy, fascist governments
We put asbestos back in the bag.
Saying that is defatism spread by useful idiots. “AI” is just software (which, hilariously, isn’t even close to AI). It’s not “here to stay”, because it’s not “here”.
We had heat-seaking, radar, face/shape-recognition with computer vision for years. Current “AI” brings nothing to the table that couldn’t be achieved earlier. Maybe a more intuitive human-computer interface, and even that is a dubious.
ML is different, and it has been “out of the bag” for a long time, but nobody batted an eye.
This isn’t as simple as it might seem. As the complexity of the intelligence scales, it’s not so simple to constrain the decision making of the intelligence.
And because of the rapid improvements in eval awareness, it’s also not so simple to screen out more subversive behaviors.
The same edge cases that leads to deleting drives and production databases with the newest transformers is going to start to occur in military applications if they scale out complex model intelligence.