Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
4 years ago
We already (sort of) do this. AI/ML is probably used for simulating nuclear explosions, and is [arguably] even more useful and accurate than actually setting off a bomb, and measuring it.
It makes sense that it could be weaponized. When Skynet becomes self-aware, it would probably just design a chemical that kills us all, and would aerosol that into the atmosphere. No need for terminators, just big pesticide cans.
I don't think AI/ML is really used for simulating nuclear explosions. There's not much point, better techniques exist.
What such better techniques exist?
Knowledge of actual physics. Explosions can "easily" be simulated from first principles. Easily in scare quotes because it takes quite a bit of computing power. This was actually my wife's first job back in 2003, simulating missile strikes for the Naval Research Lab. A thorough simulation took a few days back then, but given that was almost 20 years ago, I'm sure it's a lot faster now.
In contrast, think of what you'd need to do this via machine learning. You'd need to gather data from actual missile strikes first and learn approximation functions from that. While it's certainly doable, this is inherently less accurate, thanks to both approximation error and measurement error. It's not like pixels -> cat where the true function isn't known.
Some finite element analysis packages come with a label saying "Please pinky promise you won't use this for developing nuclear weapons".
https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/9789812707130_00... (google the author)
https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/adtsc/publications/nw_highlights_2...
https://erdc-library.erdc.dren.mil/jspui/bitstream/11681/678...
Details are obviously scarce but computers are pretty much the number 1 reason weapons testing isn't particularly necessary any more.
1 reply →
I'm quite sure we have already invented several chemicals that match your description -- like sarin gas, invented in 1938 by someone who, indeed, wanted to create a decent pesticide. A lethal dose of sarin gas is something like 28-35m³/min over 2 minutes exposure, according to wikipedia. [0]
Hitler was well aware of its creation, and I believe quite a lot of the stuff was produced for the purpose of warfare. There were several in the Nazi military who wanted to use it, but Hitler declined.
That seems rather odd, given his indifference to exterminating people with gas on an industrial scale beyond the theater of war. It has been suggested that Hitler was probably aware that to use sarin gas would be to invite the allies to do so in response, which would result in a dramatic loss of life on the German side due to the sheer lethality of such chemical weapons. [1]
Perhaps he thought it easier to stick to conventional warfare, in which the pace is more manageable than with WMDs, where you would start going down the road of mutually assured destruction but without the strategic framework in place to prevent anyone from actually wiping out a population before realising how bad an idea it would be.
And I think this reluctance to change the game, this seemingly deliberate moderation, perhaps best demonstrates the true difference between the machine and human in warfare.
It is not a difference in innovation -- we have always been very good at inventing highly optimised ways to end life.
The difference is that a machine intelligence will not hesitate. It will not ask for confirmation, pause or break a sweat. It will pull the trigger first, it will point the bombs at anything that is an adversary and anything that could theoretically be or become an adversary, and it will not miss. And it will not have to face ethical criticism and historical condemnation afterwards. [2]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/04/11...
[2]: Assuming this is a Skynet-like machine intelligence, which doesn't really have the capacity for remorse or negotiation and seems primarily, indeed solely occupied with the task of ending human life.
Obviously, a true AI that is essentially a conscious mind equivalent to our own minds, may experience the same hesitancy that most of us would, were our fingers to be over the buzzer.
Unless the AI independently arrives at a different set of values to us, like the Borg or something.
Chemical weapons are expensive. Consider the logistics and training required to effectively deploy them, plus any specialized equipment. Meanwhile, they're only useful as long as your opponent doesn't know you're planning to use chemical weapons, since countermeasures are relatively cheap and every major military knew what to do about them by the time WWII broke out. As soon as your enemy knows to beware chemical attacks, all you're doing is annoying them while making it hard for your own troops to advance (they have to put on chemical suits/masks themselves, or else wait for the gas to disperse). Very hard to use effectively in maneuver warfare. They didn't even prove very effective in WWI, which was much closer to an ideal environment for their use.
Its the classic logistics problem. Scaling ratio of weight vs volume or something like that. Just like nukes, if you heat an enemy soldier to 100M degrees he isn't any more dead than heating him to 10M degrees and volumes expand very slowly with mass so making bigger and bigger bombs is a fools-errand.
Same problem with chem weapons. You hit a tank brigade with 1000x lethal dose they aren't any deader than if you hit them with 1x dose. But if the bomb misses which is likely, all you've done is REALLY piss them off. Nerve gas in an empty wheat field just kills a bunch of corn bugs but it really pisses people off. If you target their tank brigade and miss, they'll target your home town, as we did to them with conventional bomb even without having been nerve gassed to start with. If you target their home town then the brigade you missed is going to be unhurt and really angry. Its the kind of weapon thats pretty useless unless you have infinite supply and infinite logistics. Like cold war USA or cold war Russia.
The allies had better logistics than the Germans so they knew the second time around in WWII that trying to go chem is just going to end up in the German's getting more chem'd than the allies.
Another issue is WWI and previous its all about siege warfare and breaking sieges where WMD is awesome and useful, whereas WWII and newer is all about maneuver warfare and blitzkrieg and all of Germany's plans and all of their early success were based on the idea that anything in range of shells or aircraft today is going to be occupied rear supply area next week at the latest, so destroying it would be pretty dumb because we need that area to be the rear of the battle space next week. For a modern comparison the USA could have nuked the green zone in Iraq and there's absolutely nothing anyone could have done about it, but 'we' knew we'd be occupying the green zone and needing something like the green zone, and the green zone is sitting there for the taking, so in an incredibly short term perspective it would have saved troops and saved time and saved effort to just nuke it instead of taking it the old fashioned way, but in medium and longer term it would be counterproductive to war efforts to use WMDs against the green zone, so we didn't.
Hitler probably also experienced gas (not sure his generals did, though). People forget that he was actually a decorated NCO, from WWI (which had a lot to do with his terrible attitude, later in life).
It was fairly worthless, militarily. High risk, big mess, no real tactical advantage, and it just pissed everyone off. Its only real efficacy would have been for bombing civilian targets, and I don't think they had the delivery mechanisms.
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