Comment by blibble
4 days ago
> We have prior art that says humans don't just launch all the nukes just because the computers or procedures say to.
previously no-one had spent trillions of dollars trying to convince the world that those computers were "Artificial Intelligence"
of course they did. That's the literal topic of War Games (1983). You should actually be somewhat reassured that we aren't living during the era of Dr. Strangelove where you had characters in the military industrial complex who were significantly more insane when it came to the beliefs of what computer systems and nukes can do.
There was a time when people wanted to dig tunnels with nukes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
MacArthur recommend turning the Korea-China border into a nuclear wasteland to prevent further Chinese troop movements.
Thank god everyone has nukes now it keeps people sane!
Digging tunnels with nukes sounds better to me than shooting them at each other!
All you need is a elephants foot burning into the ground and a way to direct it via partial cooling..
> That's the literal topic of War Games (1983)
Probably ran out of tokens before the end, during training.
"How about a nice game of Chess?"
> There was a time when people wanted to dig tunnels with nukes
The article seems to be about mining rather than tunnelling.
And the issue with the idea being? We also dig using explosives, there isn't an in-principle problem. Reading the wiki article it looks like the yields were excessive, but at the end of the day mining involves the use of things that go boom. It is easy to imagine small nukes having a place in the industry.
>And the issue with the idea being?
See the 'rationale' section of the article. The point of it was to rebrand nuclear weapons as multi-use 'peaceful' tools and drive acceptance for nuclear weapons programs. Which was a pretty standard tactic of military projects during the cold war.
The more available they are, the more likely they are to be used on humans.
They had to do with "state-of-the-art radars", "military-grade communication systems", etc.
Yeah but they dealt with sota and military-spec systems their entire career and they know that it just means "lowest bidder".
Or "alignment" which means "let's ensure the AIs recommend launching nukes only when it makes sense to, based on our [assumed objective] values"