How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

Forbs article claims Russian Lancets attacks were significantly reduced since September 2023, presumably because of August explosion on Zagorovskiy optic&mechanical factory, which produced cameras for Lancets.

[Haiduk]

2 hours ago, TheVulture said:

Or with a Russian spin on events:

General Tatarenko bravely personally intercepted an incoming missile and prevented it hitting the airfield. He is said to be lightly injured. 

Not confirmed yet. Russian TG sources say he was squadron coommander. This is too low duty for general rank. Even for fighter regiment command general rank is superfluous

[Haiduk]

11 hours ago, The_Capt said:

So you think maybe FPVs are working better than artillery at some point?  I mean that is two full companies worth of vehicles right there.  Probably at a fraction of the cost of artillery (when one takes overhead into account).  That is one helluva “only hope”.  Enough of these and the UA might just get the RA to buckle yet.

Key word "at some point". Despite we have now heavier "Mamont" drones, carring HE charge, but as I wrote recently drones can't substitute normal artillery shell (until it can lift it up and deliver to the target with proper speed), which could be combine both HE and fragmental effect. Usual FPV carries RPG-7 projectille, whih effective only against vehicles, less on fortifications and almost ineffective on infantry (except direct hit). "Mamont" FPV has good HE effect, so can be used against small infantry groups, blindages and infantry covered in the buildings, but it doesn't cause fragmental effect on the infantry. 

But when you have a lack of shells drones are single ultimate weapon which capable to hit enemy target precisely and dismoral enemy troops. We are already near that moment, when "at some point" the quantity will transfrom to quality.

BTW despite Russians lost 12 vehicles in this attack, they managed to reach own goal - later they forced our troops to abandon this positions by heavy artillery and avaiation strikes. 

Here is one more example of combined elimination of Russian infantry near Avdiivka from 47th mech brigade. A drone films from close distanse DPCIM impact, 25 mm Bardley gun work and FPV strikes. Warning - teared off and burning bodies.

 

 

 

Edited February 2 by Haiduk

[Tux]

1 hour ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

Using a popular cliche, if my local terminal of the wise and benevolent AI tells me to "eat bugs and be happy" because it calculates that the resultant savings at the overall economy level can be repurposed for health service and it statistically extends my life expectation by half a day, I would tell it to F.O and pour a bucket of water into it just to be sure. Would a US president be more inclined to give up the choice of e.g. lowering taxes in a pre-election year? Or Stalin the possibility of tactically inducing starvation in some regions? I would think not.

If we're talking about AI which could theoretically wage warfare entirely in our place (my concept - I understand it's not what OBJ intended to imply) then I think it is past the point where you'd know what 'decisions' it was making.  As The_Capt put it, AI would be expected to "solve for humanity" and guide us without our knowing how.  It would have to be able to understand us better than we do ourselves, so would necessarily be an emergent variety of AI rather than one we 'write'.  Think Foundation rather than robot overlords.

[OBJ]

34 minutes ago, Tux said:

Think Foundation rather than robot overlords.

By Foundation you mean predictive history?

Fictional Mathematician Hari Seldon's theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations.

Edited February 2 by OBJ

[billbindc]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

That last part is really interesting.  I have been wondering what happens when an entire nation simply hands off its entire economy management to AI - interest rates, investments/divestments, trade policy etc.  Will there come a point where AI becomes our gods, benevolent and truly objective and just?

Of course since we created them, those gods are bound to have flaws…some no doubt fatal.  As it relates to war, there are some certainties that can never be fully offloaded to AI - this is the part Clausewitz missed.  There are deep irrational certainties within us - culture, identity, suspicion and superstition.  AI could assist in smoothing these to some extent, but they could not remove them completely without removing us (note: this is less likely Skynet extermination and more pushing our evolution until we are no longer human).  

Why we go to war is an incredibly complex concept.  Clausewitz said “politics!”  Which is true.  But what is politics?  What drives politics?  In his mind it was some rational Prussian utopia of nicely compartmentalized structures.  In reality it is a human soup that makes chaos queasy.  We go to war because an imaginary Type VII civilization says we should.  We go to war because we imagine what other people are doing so hard that it becomes reality - our uncertainty becomes certainty. (Seriously how messed up is that.)

We go to war, apparently, because we think we are better than everyone else.  Which is a poor attempt to cover over our own uncertainty, which left untreated, can tear a society apart.  So until AI can effectively “solve for human” we are likely still going to see violent collisions of certainty.  

I would suggest the Culture novels for a long exegesis on this topic. 

[OBJ]

34 minutes ago, billbindc said:

I would suggest the Culture novels for a long exegesis on this topic. 

I haven't read them all but did appreciate the Cheradenine Zakalwe character in 'Use of Weapons,' if a little dark at end, and Iain Banks in general.

I suppose one point is that any society that considers itself ideal will be compelled to bring it's enlightenment to societies it judges as less ideal, especially if less ideal is judged 'barbaric', using means and methods long outlawed within the ideal society.

Edited February 2 by OBJ

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Tux said:

so would necessarily be an emergent variety of AI rather than one we 'write'. 

Emergent AI is already happening, the last generation or two of of big AI models have been able to do things which surprised the bleep out of the people that wrote them. They don't have a very good idea of what will happen when they turn up the processing power by another order of magnitude or two either. That is why people are running around with their hair on fire.

Edited February 2 by dan/california

[OBJ]

9 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Emergent AI is already happening, the last generation or two of of big AI models have been able to do things which surprised the bleep out of the people that wrote them. They don't have a very good idea of what will happen when they turn up the processing power by another order of magnitude or two either. That is why people re running around with their hair on fire.

I agree.

Below repetitive I know, still...relevant to offensive autonomous AI in the military 

In the West we'll have to get through the politicians, you know we will. They:
1. Heard Chat GPT lies
2. Heard Chat GPT makes s**t up
3. Heard Geoffrey Hinton and other AI scientific heads say AI could end humanity 
3. Went to see Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1

and, at least in the US congress, only 1 in 6 has any military experience let lone the kind of military experience that would be useful in understanding the technology's military applications

Particularly difficult as Dan says if the technology creators can't explain/prove cause and effect.

Edited February 2 by OBJ

[Maciej Zwolinski]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

And we are back to human irrationality.  You are correct, we would rather cling to the chaos and uncertainty of "freedom."  If an AI economy could guarantee an end to poverty and unpredictable recessions/depressions, completely predictable growth and wealth distribution that made sure we never saw class friction (we are basically talking Star Trek) - I have zero doubt we would march in the street to reject it completely...now that is irrational (or perhaps relatively rational is a better term)

Well, as far as my knowledge of Marxist literature goes (and it is very patchy), that is exactly what Marx wanted to guarantee. The impulse for his theory of planned economy AFAIK was the desire to avoid the uncertainity and the crash-boom cycle of capitalism. So on the other hand, we have a previous negative experience of someone promising  end of poverty, recessions and depressions, and we got a cure much worse than the disease. It is a good reason to be skeptical if an AI-provider can necessarily achieve better results with his software.  Especially because a decision to turn over the economy to AI may well be irreversible without reversing back to subsistence agriculture.

[Maciej Zwolinski]

1 hour ago, Tux said:

It would have to be able to understand us better than we do ourselves, so would necessarily be an emergent variety of AI rather than one we 'write'.  Think Foundation rather than robot overlords.

If it is an AI which is supposed to understand us better than we do ourselves, then by definition we would have no way of saying if it does well or not,  if it indeed understands us better than us, or even if it understands us at all.  We would have to go it on pure faith. I think religion is a better analogy than Foundation by that stage.

[Tux]

33 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Emergent AI is already happening, the last generation or two of of big AI models have been able to do things which surprised the bleep out of the people that wrote them. They don't have a very good idea of what will happen when they turn up the processing power by another order of magnitude or two either. That is why people are running around with their hair on fire.

Yes we are seeing "emergent" features to AI models in the sense of unexpected outputs.  The people that wrote them could still step you through the decision process the AI is supposed to follow though, right?  I think there's a difference between that and an AI which is itself emergent and perhaps even dynamic with regards to the rules it follows, though.

I enjoy these conversations but am conscious that we are drifting perilously close to a purely philosophical discussion.

[dan/california]

4 minutes ago, Tux said:

The people that wrote them could still step you through the decision process the AI is supposed to follow though, right? 

You would be amazed at how difficult it is to do this.

[Tux]

10 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

If it is an AI which is supposed to understand us better than we do ourselves, then by definition we would have no way of saying if it does well or not,  if it indeed understands us better than us, or even if it understands us at all.  We would have to go it on pure faith. I think religion is a better analogy than Foundation by that stage.

I think that, by definition, it wouldn't matter whether we believed in it or not.  But in any case belief in it or its benefits needn't be any more based on "pure faith" than our assessment of any other new technology versus a hypothetical scenario in which that technology doesn't exist.

But we really are into describing pieces of our own pure imagination, now, so I suppose your assessment stands as valid as mine.

[Tux]

6 minutes ago, dan/california said:

You would be amazed at how difficult it is to do this.

I just mean the code (not to diminish how complicated that is), not step-by-step following the rationale behind each actual decision it has made.  But point well taken - emergent AI may be emerging as we speak.

[Tux]

1 hour ago, OBJ said:

By Foundation you mean predictive history?

Fictional Mathematician Hari Seldon's theory of psychohistory, a new and effective mathematics of sociology. Using statistical laws of mass action, it can predict the future of large populations.

Yes, I mean something closer to that than to SkyNet.

[hcrof]

3 minutes ago, Tux said:

I just mean the code (not to diminish how complicated that is), not step-by-step following the rationale behind each actual decision it has made.  But point well taken - emergent AI may be emerging as we speak.

Most things people consider AI right now, from self driving cars to chatGPT is almost as hard to understand as giving someone a brain scan to ask why they like the colour pink. The code is simpler than you would think, but the "thought process" is almost totally opaque. A major area of AI research right now is trying to get it to explain why it did stuff in a way we understand 

[Battlefront.com]

4 hours ago, The_Capt said:

That last part is really interesting.  I have been wondering what happens when an entire nation simply hands off its entire economy management to AI - interest rates, investments/divestments, trade policy etc.  Will there come a point where AI becomes our gods, benevolent and truly objective and just?

Sadly, we are already headed towards that.  We still have Humans in the loop, but for some critical things the Humans are slower than the speed that systems operate at, so great harm can be done before they can intervene.  For example, the power grid fiasco we had a few years ago where a huge swath of Canada and the US went dark because an automated system encountered something it wasn't programmed to handle.  Financial institutions have long since used primitive forms of AI to make bets in the stock market and their systems can move around billions within a fraction of a second.  Things like the Robinhood (GameStop) disaster showed novel situations can be disastrous before Humans can get involved.

As AI takes on more and more realtime responsibilities, the more of this we will see happen.  While trade policy might remain Human in origin, the mechanics of it will increasingly be AI driven.

Warfare often leads the technological races in the private sector.  In the case of AI, however, I think it's the other way around.

Steve

[The_Capt]

43 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

Well, as far as my knowledge of Marxist literature goes (and it is very patchy), that is exactly what Marx wanted to guarantee. The impulse for his theory of planned economy AFAIK was the desire to avoid the uncertainity and the crash-boom cycle of capitalism. So on the other hand, we have a previous negative experience of someone promising  end of poverty, recessions and depressions, and we got a cure much worse than the disease. It is a good reason to be skeptical if an AI-provider can necessarily achieve better results with his software.  Especially because a decision to turn over the economy to AI may well be irreversible without reversing back to subsistence agriculture.

Matches my understanding as well.   Marx made one enormous error, and frankly it is the same one our current system has as well, albeit coming from another direction: fear and greed.  Marx assumed it away in the face of a "perfect theory" which everyone would see as clearly as he did.  We made it a strength and then assumed it would not hijack the entire system.  Turns out both were wrong.

Economies are "2nd order chaos" - they react to themselves.  Only AI on a hypo-human scale can ever really manage it will anything looking like predictability and stability.  But we have made it a new religion, so pulling out of human hands is going to be next to impossible, unless it can incorporate that foundation of fear and greed.  The "solution" is toxic and we will likely never trust it.  And if we ever do we will try to hijack it (see: fear and greed).

Why this matters and should be on this thread is that war is also a 2nd order chaos entity built on a foundation of fear and greed.

[OBJ]

7 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Matches my understanding as well.   Marx made one enormous error, and frankly it is the same one our current system has as well, albeit coming from another direction: fear and greed.  Marx assumed it away in the face of a "perfect theory" which everyone would see as clearly as he did.  We made it a strength and then assumed it would not hijack the entire system.  Turns out both were wrong.

Economies are "2nd order chaos" - they react to themselves.  Only AI on a hypo-human scale can ever really manage it will anything looking like predictability and stability.  But we have made it a new religion, so pulling out of human hands is going to be next to impossible, unless it can incorporate that foundation of fear and greed.  The "solution" is toxic and we will likely never trust it.  And if we ever do we will try to hijack it (see: fear and greed).

Why this matters and should be on this thread is that war is also a 2nd order chaos entity built on a foundation of fear and greed.

Just for the uninitiated, had to look this up:

Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system... Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system.

[sburke]

4 hours ago, Pete Wenman said:

It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th

P

nah, it is going to make itself appear as Taylor Swift as it goes live during halftime at the Superbowl.    or sumfink like that....  

[The_Capt]

37 minutes ago, OBJ said:

Just for the uninitiated, had to look this up:

Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system... Level two chaos is chaos that reacts to predictions about it, and therefore can never be predicted. Markets, for example, are a level two chaotic system.

It is from Harari (I think).  I argue that warfare (and economies) might be a 3rd level chaotic system - a system that reacts to imagined predictions about it.  This in essence is the human ability to remember the future in a meta-awareness way.  Another spin is the human ability to hold two diametrically opposed concepts in tension as "true." - e.g. God loves us, but made hell etc.

[Tux]

52 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Why this matters and should be on this thread is that war is also a 2nd order chaos entity built on a foundation of fear and greed.

Nice.

[kimbosbread]

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

That last part is really interesting.  I have been wondering what happens when an entire nation simply hands off its entire economy management to AI - interest rates, investments/divestments, trade policy etc.  Will there come a point where AI becomes our gods, benevolent and truly objective and just?

Paging Iain Banks to the blue telephone…

But seriously, I think this is a route you could see the US taking. The quality of politicians is atrocious, especially at the local level for many reasons, and this might just be a way out of it.

[billbindc]

45 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

It is from Harari (I think).  I argue that warfare (and economies) might be a 3rd level chaotic system - a system that reacts to imagined predictions about it.  This in essence is the human ability to remember the future in a meta-awareness way.  Another spin is the human ability to hold two diametrically opposed concepts in tension as "true." - e.g. God loves us, but made hell etc.

Add in one further caveat...any society must by definition pick relative winners and losers in resource allocation, rights, etc even in the most benign scenario possible. The politics of that by definition end up in a Butlerian Jihad every time.