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- Hacker News
- We just don't know about the military AI developments they're working on...by MotoriX
- I have a similar question. Why is AI not ring-fenced for real problems like cancer research?by telesilla
- > You're absolutely right! I killed a bunch of civilians that have nothing to do with the terror group we talked about, let me update my memoryby hollowturtle
- Military industrialist Palmer Luckey orchestrated contemporary VR with his Oculus Rift so that consumers would subsidize the costs of his miltech projects. I believe this is the same thing. Push your miltech with the "gadgets and toys and digital assistants" angle so that regular people foot the bill.
- Most tech starts civilian, the military ones are rare exceptions.
As for your specific examples
>Robots/Drones
Autonomous robots aren't good enough yet for military, those which are used are teleoperated and thus not in the realm of AGI companies
>Surveillance
Not really a military matter, and of course we have Palantir which is doing this directly. Perhaps OpenAI/Anthropic have contracts with respect to government surveillance we don't know about
- > They seem to build civilian products first and only later rent them out for military purposes / national security
I guess the keyword here is "seem", we don't actually know, and it'd probably take 20+ years before anyone would know. Most people didn't know about lots of military technology until it's basically mainstream on the entire planet, so you're right now (potentially) in the moment where that stuff is happening, we just don't know about it.
- The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and then western military R&D funding dropped drastically. Shrunken military R&D pipeline = less cool discoveries that eventually filter over to civilian applications.by ThrowawayR2
- Look at drones. Drones are a revolution in military affairs if there ever was one but they were not brought to you by military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin but instead developed as a consumer technology by the likes of DJI.
In some sense military technology is like an ant and consumer technology is like a 100 foot high giant robot. Military technology will produce innovation in wartime but in peacetime it is a backwater.
by PaulHoule