@GossiTheDog

www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

"Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

someone sent me this last week to prove anthropic is not like other ai companies because it's "ethical"...

cc: @NicholasLaney

@GossiTheDog

A war crime in an illegitimate war.

@GossiTheDog This wasn't a fuckup, this was a choice.

Before there were precision weapons, the military would saturate an area with artillery or dumb bombs. The advantages were that the weapons were cheap and you didn't need precise information about where the target was, exactly. The disadvantage was everything in the area, or nearby, would get destroyed.

If you had a dude with eyes on the target and comms, you could call for fires and walk the shots onto the target. Forward Observers have been a thing since artillery could shoot accurately over a hill. We've used binoculars + messengers, or balloons + telegraphs, or airplanes + radios, or eyeballs + battle phone.

Then we got guidance kits. Now the weapons cost a shitload more(*1) and you need to have accurate digits for every target. Wrong digit, wrong target. It meant a 1:50K map wasn't good enough. If you were using an Laser Range Finder, then you needed a better compass than your Silva or your Garmin or your DAGR because an accurate North is *really *important for trigonometry(*2). Your maps needed to be better, and the awful GPS accuracy for elevation became an issue. So if we cared about the target and collateral damage, you put a dude on the ground with a laser designator for precise targeting. You might even use a very small (grenade-sized) or even non-explosive warheads, but that requires *really *precise digits or manual aiming.

Now we've got expensive and accurate bombs but we need a fair amount of human effort to make the digits right or manually guide the weapons. **We intentionally make that tradeoff to limit collateral damage.**

But human effort is slow and expensive. So now we use A fucking I? **That gives us the collateral of damage of dumb bombs at the cost of precision weapons. ** Fucking idiocy. At some point, stupidity becomes negligence, and eventually criminal.

(*1) Dumb 250 bomb (Mk81) would cost around $500 in Vietnam. A modern Small Diameter Bomb (250 pounds), with guidance, and datalink (so you can update the target in flight) runs about $200K. A dumb bomb with a guidance kit was like $30K ten years ago.

(*2) I worked on software for battlefield targeting systems. Finding north is hard, and it's the basis for calculating the digits. I've seen several approaches: live with inaccuracy (i.e., try to avoid leaning against a tank when you're using your digital magnetic compass) (USAF), use two GPS receivers + Differential GPS + the LRF to calculate North (UK, Germany - but this weighs more so their targeting teams are larger to shlep the gear) or celestial tracker (you need a view of the sky, so not always useful in urban or jungle) ("special customers").

@GossiTheDog I've heard that the school was hit to provoke an equally terrible response that could then be lofted up in the media as justification. But the school being selected by a hallucination engine would be just as bad.

We need a new set of Nuremberg Trials to figure this all out.

#newnuremberg