Da Capo, Dr. Strangelove! This Time With Artificial "Intelligence"

Just around the corner, it seems, are autonomous killer drones, killer robots and killer whatever. And of course we have to have them to make sure that the other side doesn't get them first. Not to mention the fact that miscellaneous terrorists near and far will one day get their hands on them too.

"Almost unnoticed outside defense circles, the Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy to maintain the United States’ position as the world’s dominant military power. It is spending billions of dollars to develop what it calls autonomous and semiautonomous weapons and to build an arsenal stocked with the kind of weaponry that until now has existed only in Hollywood movies and science fiction, raising alarm among scientists and activists concerned by the implications of a robot arms race.
The Defense Department is designing robotic fighter jets that would fly into combat alongside manned aircraft. It has tested missiles that can decide what to attack, and it has built ships that can hunt for enemy submarines, stalking those it finds over thousands of miles, without any help from humans. 

'If Stanley Kubrick directed ‘Dr. Strangelove’ again, it would be about the issue of autonomous weapons,' said Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management."

Matthew Rosenberg and John Markoff: The Pentagon's 'Terminator Conundrum': Robots That Could Kill on their Own. (New York Times, October 25, 2016)

Hoping for a Hollywood ending?

Dream on!

P.S. I noted the coming of autonomous killer robots in a blog post from 2013.

The Big Difference Between the German and the U.S. Economy is Spelled WAR

David Brooks is a reasonably reasonable conservative, and his sociological insights often canny, but his political conclusions are usually off. In his column last Friday, The Parent Model he is trying to twist reality against Obama's stimulus package, but that is absurd. The German economy - like many other European economies - has built-in automatic stabilizers. The Germans didn't need to pass laws to boost the economy as it already has a system in place, which protects jobs and secures people's income and health insurance in a recession. This is not the case in the U.S., making a more forceful government action necessary. The fact that the U.S. is deeper in debt than the Germans is a result of conservative recklessness, especially the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded wars. Which brings us to the probably most consequential difference between the U.S. and Germany.... the war cost. The civilian American economy is undermined by the military expenditures, which perverts its competitiveness and increases the country's reliance on outsourcing.

Good parenting is not going to solve this issue.

Hans Sandberg