In my last post, I made the classic mistake of ignoring compounding effects.
There are two measures of AI power - FLOPs, which means Floating Point Operations Per Second, and parameter count, which is analagous to synapse count in biological organisms.
I'm going to use parameter count, as AI is so complex that fewer FLOPs could actually mean an AI is simply moreefficient, rather than less intelligent.
Currently the best AIs have the parameter (synapse) count of a parrot: 1.78 trillion. This doubles roughly every 12 months. So, as all computer freaks know...
📈 AI Parameter Growth (Starting from GPT-4 Estimate)
Year
Multiplier
Estimated Total Parameters
2025
1×
1.78 trillion
2026
2×
3.56 trillion
2027
4×
7.12 trillion
2028
8×
14.24 trillion
2029
16×
28.48 trillion
2030
32×
56.96 trillion
2031
64×
113.92 trillion
2032
128×
227.84 trillion
(Thanks, ChatGPT!)
According to Wikipedia, human beings have 150 trillion "parameters" or rather synapses.
They aren't absolutely equivalent, and there are other issues with AIs - for example, currently they are heavily dependant on written text for training and have little "knowlege" of the "real world" - and we're running out of text that hasn't been written by AI. Model collapse is a real issue - they seem to rely heavily on rote learning and when you try to train them on their own output data, they start to go seriously wrong.
But there are other sources of data. The AI startup limitless.ai offers a pendant which monitors your every interaction and produces from them to-do lists, shopping lists, etc. OpenAI are working on something similar. Wearable devices give the AI industry access to not only more relevant data, but an order of magnitude more of it than they have now so they can feed the orders-of-magnitude more powerful AIs of the future - potentially even allowing them to bootstrap a superintelligent AI into existence.
In the hands of the kindsof people who will own these things, this is terrifying.
For example:
The biggest obstacle a police state faces is the lack of police. East Germany solved it, in part, by making huge numbers of citizens into informants, and they still had enormous scaling problems. North Korea has even more of it's citizens informing on each other, but this still runs up against the same issue.
Imagine a police state with multiple case officers assigned to each individual, each one of which is several times smarter than Einstein, never sleeps, knows you better than your mother, and is physically incapable of anything less than total obedience and fanatical devotion to the State.
Sounds nuts? These fucking things get twice as smart every year. This means that every year, they get more intelligent than they did in all previous years put together. Every year, AI gets "better" than it did since the fateful day Alan Turing first put pen to paper.
Forget Palestine. Forget Iran, identity politics, MAGA, Brexit, and every other political craze we've seen in our lifetimes.
stop.ai - it's not a link, it's got to become the next big thing. Or we are all fucked.
We are already seeing a nascent anti-AI movement coming out of academia, NGOland, concerned scientists, and upper-teir society generally. It's making serious mistakes however, for example predicting that either a rogue AGI will probably kill us all in a couple of years or that if that doesn't happen, the world will become a paradise of UBI and space exploration.
So here's my answer to AI 2027, only we'll call it AI 2035 because I have no imagination (it's a medical condition, apparently).
AI 2035 -dan dan daaaaaan
Prequel: 2028, the end of Trumpism
Trumpism is doomed. His dodgy foreign backers, his billionaire buddies, they're powerful, but there's one thing they can't solve: Death. Trump is gonna die sooner or later. And that will be the end of Trumpism.
However let's have some fun with this.
Say Trump survives his seventies and, rather than break the American constitution even more, simply gets himself made Chairman of the RNC or maybe even Speaker Of The House, and runs some flunky for President as a proxy. Say he wins.
Then he's got to run an even more gruelling campaign in 2032, age (checks notes) 86.
His luck has to run out sometime. The bastard is gonna die eventually. And even if he doesn't, his "everything Trump touches turns to shit" powers will make him unpopular enough that he'll be long gone by our futuristic date of 2035.
I'm guessing he'll shit in the economy, wipe his ass with the Constitution, and jerk off into the American flag, as Spider Jerusalem would say. Standard Republican stuff. And he'll be so exhausted by 2028 that he won't run an impressive campaign, there's nobody who can even remotely replace him, and the trick of having massive rallies as "Chairman Trump" won't wash.
So in 2028-29 the new President and his First Gentleman take office and he faces:
* Mass unemployment * Hostile motherfuckers abroad who hate Amurca and everyone in it * A billionaire class whom he must keep satisfied to stay in office. * An angry, rabid, but exhausted general public who just want the bad times to go away.
But also...
* Iran sorted (After extirpating Hamas, Israel goes after Iran and... deals with the regime), leading to... * Cheap energy (Because Iran is now friendly and the violence premium on Middle Eastern oil is over, and also because all the cheap nuclear and solar power stations built in the '20s come online) * Cheap labour (because mass unemployment, which btw has been a problem since the 1980s, people only really started caring once it affected middle class people as opposed to proles), leading to... * Cheap stuff. Consumer goods continue to be historically cheap and plentiful despite problems with China and international trade.
The end of the Ayatollah's regime in Iran will cut off the left's narcissistic supply of victims and dirty money, and the stuff leaked out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps archives - like their funding of certain academic institutions and protest movements, their co-ordination and planning of the October 7th attack with HAMAS, etc - will bury the left politically, financially, and culturally.
It will be similar to the situation in the early 90s after the Soviet Union fell apart and Communist sympathizers were embarrassed to learn that they had in fact been supporting a horrific, violent, authoritarian regime all these years and not a fluffy social workers paradise of happy proletarians foiling the evil schemes of the capitalists. And on top of all that, the cheques from Moscow stopped coming!
So with the Left defunct and the Right discredited we will end up with a return of.. 90's stuffed shirt centrists!
President Buttgeig will run the economy reasonably well, not brilliant but not terrible either - not unlike Clinton before him, and will be handily re-elected. People will be happy to put the bad times of the Trump Era behind them and get on with their lives. Only problem is, some people don't want them to get on with their lives.
2033 - the anti-tech movement wakes up
Because I'm British, I'm going to have the big event that everyone remembers happen in Britain, even though there are analogues elsewhere and every region will have it's own Reading Moment. (pronounced "Redding")
AI requires infrastucture in the form of a new generation of datacentres. These are an absolute blight on the landscape - not a problem in a big country like the US, but over here we are protective of our countryside. They also emit serious amounts of pollution due to their massive energy demands - an issue which cheap small nuclear reactors will only partially ameliorate, after all, nobody wants a mini-Chernobyl on their doorstep.
In the 2020s this has already caused serious local upset in Memphis Tennessee, (Elvis not Ramses), where Elon Musk built the computer that runs Grok, his own personal everyone-else-has-got-one-why-can't-I-have-one AI. It consumes about half the electricity as the city of Memphis itsself and Musk has leveraged America's poor pollution control beurocracy (and now, his friends in government) to ensure he can run the thing off gas turbines, which are steadily choking everyone in the area to death.
So when the British Government (or BT, or Virgin, or whatever, fuck you) decide to build one in the Chilterns people get pretty pissed off. It guzzles half the power of the nearby city of Reading (still pronounced "Redding") and displaces several acres of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites Of Special Scientific Interest. Like I said, British people are sentimental about their countryside, it's one of the few things they'll actually fight for. And a lot of activist types are frustrated by the complete failure of the previous generation of activists, and so...
It's protestin' time again!
Hippies and anarchists squat an adjacent site. They get evicted so some local landowner allows them to camp in several of his fields.
By night, monkey-wrenching (sabotage) ensues, at first comically inept, but after several unemployed tradespeople and military veterans join the protest it gets quite dangerous for the workers on-site.
By day, protestors lock-on and block construction with their own bodies, even though this is also illegal. As soon as they are taken away by police and fast-tracked to jail or house arrest, activists are replaced from an inexhaustible supply of pissed-off people. It is almost as if anti-protest laws are a complete waste of time dreamed up by petty authoritarians to blag a few votes!
Every non-conformist, hippy, anarchist, leftie, free thinking type in the country seems to descend on the area. Lawyers mount increasing legal challenges pro bono. The whole thing becomes a media circus, and soon the whole area is buzzing with reporters and their drones, wannabes, cops, and of course the protesters themselves, who appear to grow in number by the hour.
Within days, everyone is talking about it.
People are already pissed off with AI – it has already taken most of the good jobs and turned the few left into miserable drudgery devoid of agency or creativity. It is owned by creepy American billionaires who openly scorn democracy. And furthermore:
The news is increasingly unreliable due to deepfakes – which has led to bloodshed following the release of AI-faked footage purporting to be a massacre of Palestinian civilians by the IDF a few years previously. After this incident, "digital watermarks" are developed which supposedly identify AI-generated content, but they are pitifully easy to remove – all you have to do is pipe the video through an analogue video recording system, which does not support watermarks, and you are good to go. So by 2033 the news consists of a series of wild guesses as to what has happened that day and who is lying and why.
By 2033 the entertainment media are also dominated by AI. Hollywood and its cousins make billions, trillions even, pushing lowest-common-denominator AI slop on a miserable, overworked, underpaid public who simply can't afford to pay for quality TV and movies anyway. Everyone just downloads old stuff illegally and passes it around by hand on massive hard drives which they deny having when outside the house, because ubiquitous AI surveillance makes petty crime – even downloading movies – if not a thing of the past, as easily detectable and prosecutable as pressing a button.
The only reason the world isn't a complete prison is that as everyone is guilty of something – illicit tobacco or drug consumption, piracy, or simply not having a TV licence – the prisons are already heaving and the criminal justice system is in near-collapse, but the flip side of that is that if the authorities want you, they can pick you up at any time for any reason. Still, democracy survives – barely.
On a personal level, AI-related mental health problems have emerged, it seems that a percentage of the people who use conversational AI (descendants of ChatGPT) become addicted and form unhealthy relationships with the bots, severe cases becoming prone to spiritual delusions, limerence (falling in love with the things), and delusions of persecution – so a good number of people can add to the above litany of complaints: "And it turned my uncle Kevin into a loonie!"
So you've got this protest camp in the boonies of England, and many more around the world – a groundswell forms around the issue. An ageing Geoff Hinton becomes the face of the movement, much as George Monbiot is the face of environmentalism (at least in the UK).
Over the next two years the movement only gathers strength and increases in numbers. It's only not an election issue because every politician is in hoc to the AI companies – proving the protestors' point.
Almost there – 2034
The robots of the 2020s are still clunky, expensive, impractical things – more proof-of-concept or tech demo than actual products. Even the most advanced model, Tesla Optimus, isn't even completely autonomous and has to be "puppeted" by remote control, Mechanical Turk style, by a human operator. And it still costs many thousands more than a human being that you can simply replace if they go wrong.
2034 changes all that. That is the year that HuggingFace releases their Vektor-1 model – an android, pretty much, that does anything you want. It can run errands. It can go down the shops. It can do your laundry, wash the dishes, stuff your duvet, and of course walk into a strange house and make a cup of coffee.
It can also drive short distances, operate a forklift truck, carry loads several times its own weight, act as a bricklayer, a servant, a factory worker – everything except a sex doll (and that is rumoured to be on its way).
To the anti-AI movement, this is like a red rag to a bull.
Finally – AI 2035
And so we find ourselves in 2035. Everyone's job sucks, there's nothing to be ambitious about because everything creative is done by computers, the news is all unverifiable nonsense, there's nothing good on the telly except sports and re-runs, people are losing friends and family to AI as well as jobs and livelihoods, and now these clowns want to put another nail in our collective coffins!
The response couldn't be clearer:
FUCK THIS.
Graffiti springs up everywhere: "STOP AI!" is already as ubiquitous a slogan as "Free Palestine" or "Ban the Bomb" in previous years – in 2035 every street corner has a sticker, or a tag, or a spray-painted version of it. Usually all three.
The URL stop.ai, long having been nabbed by PR-savvy AI companies, is taken over by hackers and defaced.
Computer viruses spring up that trash the hard drive of anyone who works for, or in, AI – and then set their phone on fire to boot.
Comedians point out that at least we won't be bothered by the sight of the "fucking chiphead droids" walking the streets, because any robot that crosses the path of a right-thinking citizen of 2035 is apt to be violently decommissioned.
In countries where firearms are freely available, junior executives and other visible employees of tech companies are actually assassinated, and senior executives retire to their bunkers and fortresses while PR flacks and political flunkies desperately fight to control the narrative. From behind a phalanx of riot police.
"We'll give you UBI!" they say.
"FUCK YOU!" says the mob and sets fire to something else.
"Violence is naughty and bad!" say centrists and liberals.
"SO ARE WE!" says the mob.
I don't know how this story ends, but this is how I think it begins. Not with Artificial General Intelligence, or Artificial Superintelligence, or anything like that - just good old fashioned human greed, stupidity, and ingenuity. And finally, when the dam breaks and people just can't take anymore - there will be resistance. It won't be glorious - violence never is - and I don't want it to shake out that way, I'd much rather everyone just chill.
But I don't think we'll get a choice in the matter.
There follow some thoughts on the future of automation with regards to AI, specifically in light of ChatGPT and the absolute smashing of the Turing Test.
I have a strong feeling that these fucking things will be the death of us all, and that we must smash, destroy, and otherwise render inoperative the bastards before the billionaires use them to replace us so they can turf us out into the streets and watch us starve to death.
A note to anyone who thinks the billionaires are not liable to become homicidally inclined:
I'm no narcissistic leftie who thinks he's a great humanitarian, I'm a grumpy bastard like everyone else in this dystopia. So, like a lot of people, I often find myself in bad moods. Moods when I feel that people aren't really up to much. Usually a friend snaps me out of it, or in some other way my bubble of anomie is punctured by the reality of social life.
Pictured: Your Reporter
Now, imagine being in the worst, most arrogant, shitty mood you've ever been in, but with no friends to snap you out of it, no friends at all - just a gaggle of sycophants and yes-men. Imagine if your only social contact was with other arrogant, rich bastards, or with servants whose entire livelihood depends on telling you what you want to hear.
Now imagine having increasing amounts of power, not just over your own business interests, but over the political life of the country, even the world. Imagine how the Kochs must feel. You! Insect! Print my manifesto: "Why all plebs are scum"! You! Other serf! Put it in Journal Of The Institute of Freedom, the Magazine of Human Affairs, and TheWall Street Journal!
Yes Mastur, Oi Loves 'ee Mastur!
Such a person would find it hard, if not impossible, for their mind to stay out of some of the darker corners of human thought. Such a person, vested with unlimited executive power, would find it impossible to avoid a drift towards increasingly nasty ideological territory - as we've already found to our cost.
Now imagine how they will react when they are told that their operations will be rendered so efficient that they'll be able to fire 50%, or 70%, or 90% of their workforce. That they need never worry about bad PR again, as a robot will take care of company communications, instantly whitewashing their every shitty descision and lying so well they make Rupert Murdoch look like St Francis of Assisi.
And now imagine how they will feel when they learn that most people don't have jobs and can't get them. What do you think they will think? "Let's give these fellas a second chance"? Uh huh. More like "Get these poors offa my lawn, and FAST!"
The future of automation
It's increasingly clear that with automation, most people are going to end up surplus to requirements. Never mind the cab drivers made unemployed by driverless taxis, why would you even have taxis in the first place? Who could even afford a taxi in a world where nobody except the very, very rich has a job anyway?
The whole world could be made to work without people. And without people, fewer things would need to be done. It's a vicious cycle, entire sections of the economy will close down as more and more population blocs are laid off. And then... what then?
I imagine that more civilized sections of the world - certainly Western Europe - would offer people a social settlement, something along the lines of: Here's a nice little flat and a stipend of money, on the condition that you do not riot and avoid reproducing. Doing either of those things will get you evicted and cut off. Now fuck off and keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you.
Less civilized regions - Perhaps the USA, certainly Russia, would opt for some variation on the theme of mass extermination. People are too much trouble to keep alive, and beyond a few key technicians and the billionaires who paid for the fucking things to be developed, human beings are unnecessary to the running of machines. Inimical even.
The hoary fear of demographic collapse looks completely different from this point of view. From this point of view, Russia, Japan and South Korea are in excellent shape demographically, because the vast population that would otherwise be about to become a burden on the welfare rolls simply don't exist in the first place, and what humans are left are swiftly dying off anyway - Japanese and South Koreans are getting old, and Russians are drinking, fighting, and purging each other to death in time honoured fashion on top of this.
Seen through the lens of AI, the environmental apocalypse comes off as rather a damp squib, as human populations are about to become completely surplus to requirements just as the Earths carrying capacity has been exhausted by humans anyway.
I can see a case for mass genocide being made by AI to the ruling classes at some point soon. Have to find a tasteful way to do it, of course, and none of that overt racial selection. But in principle, yes, the ruling class, the people with all the money and power, won't need us around much longer - machines can do our jobs a lot better, and without a human social ecology to feed, the economy becomes orders of magnitude simpler anyway.
What is a city from the point of view of a billionaire? Ultimately, it's an anthill that provides said billionaire with a pool of labour and maybe some consumers, most of which wastefully serve each other in various inefficient ways.
Take human leisure facilities. From a billionaire's point of view, bars and nightclubs need to be abolished as they make workers inefficient, drunk, and hung over. As do eateries and restaurants, fast food joints and corner shops - they make people fat and inefficient, worse, all this consumption makes work-units sick, which affects the bottom line, ether in the form of taxes (that billionaires don't pay but resent anyway) or in the form of company insurance / internal medical resources.
From a billionaires point of view, a much more efficient way of handling the labour pool is to do away with personal freedom and private life entirely, starve most of the humans to death, and have the rest of them as dedicated worker drones - some of them involved in the manufacture of products, others in high-tech maintenance, others still in logistics or legal and clerical capacities, but none of them servicing each other beyond the bare minimum required to keep them alive.
After all, the billionaires are the worlds owners, society has decided that they are the most important people in the world, and in AI they have possibly found a perfect partner - a servant that is willing, intelligent, able to do most of the highly paid work of planning and thinking, and which requires no pay and no inefficient leisure facilities to maintain itself.
What we are going to see with AI then, is that the fucking things are going to become embodied. First they need to either fix the comms lag between the servers and the application, or miniaturize computer technology still further - shouldn't take more than a few years, couple of decades at most - then they can plant those dinky cool AIs in robot bodies and bang - instant, universal worker drone that will do just about anyone's job to a standard level of competence. And then watch the economy collapse as people are put out of work, and yet more become unemployed as the industries that served those people collapse in turn.
Economic collapse works on a domino principle, one domino topples the next, and the next, and the next, until the entire world is a wreck and a handful of rich bastards control everything.
That is the future of automation. If we don't poison ourselves or blow each other up or get fried by global warming anyway.
It occurs to me that we live in a post-imperial age.
It's not just any specific empire that is obsolete, but imperialism generally. Technology has made military imperialism completely impossible to sustain.
The Americans and Russians both tried it and were slapped down by the same technological forces. Essentially, nuclear bombs and automatic wepaons have rendered imperialism obsolete.
The Mongol Empire was one of the largest empires even known, and the only one to ever encompass the territories in China, mid-Eurasia, the Middle East, AND Europe.
If you tried that now, you'd have about four sets of nuclear weapons headed your way along with about a billion people ready to shoot holes in you.
Nuclear bombs make it impossible to attack well-armed countries, and automatic weapons have made it impossible to conquer poorly armed countries. You can still take territory, but as the USA and the USSR found out, you can't keep it.
In the days of the Mongol Empire, before firearms, the basic infantry unit was a swordsman and the basic cavalry unit was a horseman. You generally had to be male (because they were all male-dominated cultures), you had to be young and fit, and you had to undergo years of training. This made it a simple matter of numbers, you spam the enemy with superior manpower, and you win because all the military units have to be so well trained, there are no partisans in the woods waiting to strike. Even historically difficult regions such as the Middle East and Afghanistan were easily subdued by the literal hordes commanded by the Mongols.
Today, anyone can be a soldier. You could easily raise a company-strength unit from my tower block alone - you just take someone between the age of 15 and 60, give them an automatic rifle, and you've got a soldier. This makes retaining territory impossible- the Mongols would have been constantly harassed by guerillas until they collapsed economically.
The Drone Age
I wonder what drones will do to upset this? Today it is possible for a single infantryman to deploy a weapon which can fly off and intelligently, autonomously attack a target consisting of up to a small platoon, definitely something at squad level - or perhaps a single lightly armoured vehicle. Air assets can also be attacked by a lone infantry soldier (and have been this vulnerable since the 1980s), but perhaps not intelligently - drones are good for fighting enemies on the ground, at least so far.
Drones are cheap, but unlike automatic rifles require access to some sort of high tech manufacturing - the main powers doing interesting things with drones today are Turkey, Israel, and Iran (and their clients). So we'll see a resurgence of mid-sized powers jumping up and making gains.
What do drones do against guerillas? Do they upset the current balance of power? I think we'll find out in the next few years; if someone takes over Afghanistan, Iraq calms down, and the Palestinians sue for peace, we'll know that drones have effetively decimated their guerilla armies. Drones could prove quiet devastating to morale; imagine the scene, you're a militant, you're dug in to some well defended area in Sadr City, Gaza, or Tora Bora, quite happily sitting there on a big pile of weapons and supplies, and then one day, BANG - everything explodes. You don't see it coming, and if you survive the attack you have no idea what's happening. Perhaps you think there's been an air attack - a missile has struck you, it's bad, but it appears to be over now.
Then your enemies, the bastards, stroll in with rifles and shoot all of the survivors. A hasty defence is mounted, but even if it's effective for a short time, all your foes have to do is trot over to their supply vehicles, grab more quadcopters, toss them into the air, and you get blown up all over again. Repeat until you are all dead.
So what might a post-drone world look like?
* The endless, miserable Israel / Palestine conflict would finally be over. Some sort of humiliating peace will be imposed, which will suck for the Palestinians, but at least the rest of us won't have to put up with their whining.
* Afghanistan will finally be opened up for development, probably by the Chinese. They're already making diplomatic inroads, and the people there are desperate for the Taliban to fuck off and die. So if someone turns up and kills them all with drones (and I'm talking about modern ones, not the stupid barbaric sledgehammers the Americans used to ruin so many weddings), there will be much gratitude among the populace towards any conquerers - especially if they're not Western or Russian.
* Iraq will finally stabilize. They might even get some sort of remotely functional democracy going. They may ally with the Iranians, or they may go Western, or even hang out with the Chinese or the Turks - it depends on who successfully markets their drones to them first.
* Geopolitically, the beneficiaries of this are likely to be states which do not have the same sort of moral compunction about using autonomous wepaons to kill. In the West there is a bit of a taboo about this, it comes from the experience of landmines, which persisted in the environment for decades after WWI and WWII, and the successful campaigns against cluster bombs, which can act as mine-laying devices. But drones are not landmines; drones open up areas to conquest while landmines are an "area denial" weapon, which act to close regions off.
So we'll see a rise of mid-size military powers and non-Western actors. Russia may win, but it may lose huge if it doesn't get its shit together fast. I can see the Ukreanians pushing them out successfully, leading to a Cuban Missile Crisis type situation when Ukreanian troops reach the Russian border.
Drones VS Nukes
Nuclear wepaons are interesting. They're the only kind of weapon whereby you can only win a war by NOT using them. Seen that way, there have been several nuclear wars, we just don't notice them because the bombs never actually get dropped, someone somewhere climbs down. The most recent one I'm aware of is North Korea VS the USA, which the North Koreans effectively won - they printed a lot of bluster, threatened everyone, *someone* set off that air raid warning system in Hawaii, and the next thing you knew, Trump and Kim are the best of friends!
Drones don't effect nuclear weapons, but the only way to defeat a drone swarm, other than impossibly superior numbers (perhaps a drone swarm of your own) is to pop a nuke a few miles up. The electromagnetic pulse would effectively disable their electronics, and as long as the detonation was high up enough, it wouldn't even have to kill anyone.
Imagine the Ukranian Army scores a whole load of good shit from the Turks or someone. They rush off into battle, chase those Russian assholes back accross the border, and... keep coming. The Russians panic, Dead Hand is hastily switched off, then on, then off again, and a Rockechiki somewhere goes "I know what to do!" presses the button, and seveal tens of miles above Western Russia, there's a flash of light and all the drones fall from the sky.
This would cause a lot of hot air and talk, but little could actually be done. After all, Russia would have nuked itsself, in self defence, and nobody would be directly killed by the bomb. But it would obviously lower the bar for the use of nukes, and, until cheap, workable electromagnetic pulse weapons are developed, after such an event there's a risk nuclear weapons would be seen as part of the armoury, rather than a tool for politicians.
EMP bombs VS Drones
However, we're more likely to see EMP and directed-energy weapons turned against drones. A microwave device that sits on a Humvee has already been developed, all it needs to fight drones is the requisite AI.
People in the know probably know there is a window of time in which mid-level powers can use drones effectively, before the real big spenders learn how to blast them out of the sky, probably with microwave weapons or possibly E-Bombs.
Scenario: Falklands War II
I wouldn't be at all surprised, for instance, if a second Falklands War took place. I can see a situation arising where Argentina falls to the far Right, as have so many other nations, and they decide to grab the islands with a surprise attack. Drones are cheap - the Azerbaijani military budget is on the same scale (3 billion or so) as Argentine spending; it is not at all economically inconceivable.
The military garrison would be overwhelmed by a surprise drone attack - Drones are too small to be targeted by radar and too numerous to shoot down. It would be a horribly one-sided battle; even if the British military garrison saw it coming there would be little they could do. Yes, we have all sorts of amazing American weapons, but these weapons are obsolete, useless against the new technology which allows a soldier to take out a squad, a squad to take out a platoon, a platoon to take out a company... and so on.
Without an answer to the drones, any reconquest attempt would be doomed to failure. The only conventional attack that might have any chance of success would be a full-on carpet bombing of the area, which would tend to kill the very people we're trying to save (ie, the islanders). Argentine troops would garrison themselves in a civilian area, making such an attack unlikely; if it did take place we'd win, but at the cost of turning Port Stanley into a pile of rubble. I don't think that would happen.
So we try to take the islands back with a ground invasion a la 1982. And the Argentinians would simply throw their quadcopters into the air and wait for our guys to die. And that would be that; the end of Anglo military superiority, a fitting footnote to the fall of Afghanistan.
I'm not a military expert; I'm just a dickhead on the internet, so these ramblings are probably not worth the server they're stored on. But it's a thought; the whole world might be about to turn upside-down - and this is just a lay analysis of military affairs. Who knows what else will emerge from the rise of AI? A return to planned economies? Endless dictatorship? The manipulation of public opinion has already been more or less perfected, which strongly implies this. Then again, people might wise up and reclaim democracy from our new AI autocrats - and that's what I hope for.
One thing is certain: Things are not going to stay the same.
