Comment by spxneo
2 years ago
The most disturbing part for me (going beyond Israel/Palestine conflict) is that modern war is scary:
- Weaponized financial trojan horses like crypto
- Weaponized chemical warfare through addictions
- Drone swarm attacks in Ukraine
- AI social-media engineered outrage to change publics perception
- Impartial, jingoistic mainstream war propaganda
- Censorship and manipulation of neutral views as immoral
- Weaponized AI software
Looks like a major escalation towards a total war of sorts.
The world has been at a perpetual war for forever! That is actually quite interesting in of itself.
There has been no mass self-correction to my knowledge that would avert this kind of destructive behavior.
But in saying that, I am fully aware that most of such behavior stems from people who are in charge of the world at a political level.
Is it implausible to think that this is something that will have to change in order for the world to change?
The war doesn’t serve anyone but a few rotten minds who are trying to make decisions on behalf of millions if not billions of people.
And we share a similar nudge. I do think that was is happening in the world today is a mere preparation (of society) for a massive power struggle in various parts of the world that will inevitably lead to a full-blown war. But this is only my personal feeling/interpretation.
Judged by number of war-related deaths per capita, we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. The last major conflict was the Second Congo War in the ‘90s, which killed around 5.4 million people and involved a bunch of African nations. If you want to talk about scary wars, try reading about that one.
I realize this seems almost unrealistically upbeat, and most people don’t want to believe it given what we see in the media every day. Note that I’m not arguing against increasing global instability, which will become worse if Russia triumphs in Ukraine (whatever form that could take) or the US continues to turn its back on its allies.
Disinformation and AI fakery via social media are probably the scariest things to me on your list. Twitter is now a garbage dump for this stuff, but the good news is that it is hemorrhaging both users and money.
I don’t see magnitude of mortality as necessarily a good indicator for the prevalence of violence or “peace”.
Let’s say, for the sake of the thought experiment, that every weekday, a small swarm of killer drones is released in your city. These drones reliably, randomly target and kill 250 commuters per weekday.
That’s only 62,500 people per year. Pretty mild. Certainly nowhere near as bad as Covid, maybe about as bad as a bad flu year, right? Heart disease kills about 700,000 people a year, so it’s not even 10% of that. Barely registers on the dashboard.
War has always been scary. We are busy inventing new ways of killing each other and there is no sign of stopping.
I'm sorry, you think this is new?
War is terrible. War has always been terrible. It was almost certainly worse in the past, but it still sucks now. Most of the things you mention were way worse 100 years ago.
Sure, AI didn't write the propaganda, instead humans did. The affect was the same.