You could just poke the gun out and it would do the shooting I also think being substantially more accurate would make cover fire a lot more effective. And that could allow you to be much more mobile on the battlefield. Anyhow, this is just one example.
The most obvious example to me is a Stuart Russell slaughterbot—although those aren’t really plausible near-future technologies at this point since they already exist. Using some really good AI to control them directly (deep RL becomes good enough for effective robot control?), along with some high energy density battery storage might make them long-range and much more lethal. Though countermeasures (directed energy weapons) do exist and are being researched.
Military takeover is a diplomatic process in which you convince people to obey you. You do that by offering a better Schelling point than rival claimants to the throne, and by defeating your rivals in battle. You don’t need to defeat them all at once; you can start small and scale up.
I think there’s another element to it. In Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond argued that a lot of the reason for the conquistador’s successes came down to their abilities to do things that were outside the frame of reference of the native culture, like invite the Emperor to parley and then just kidnap him. In other words, to the Inca the conquistadors exhibited a weak kind of cognitive uncontainability, furthering the analogy with AI takeover.
Voiceover: Pizarro and his most trusted officers debate their options for how to deal with Ataxalpa. Some advise caution, but Pizarro insists their best chance is to launch a surprise attack the next day. It’s a tactic that’s worked successfully in the past. Twelve years before Pizarro went to Peru, another famous conquistador, Hernan Cortez, had gone to Mexico and encountered another formidable civilization; the Aztecs. He conquered the country by kidnapping the Aztec leader and exploiting the ensuing chaos. Cortez’s story was later published and became a bestseller, a handbook for any would-be conquistador. It can still be found in the great library of Salamanca University in Northern Spain.
Jared Diamond: This wonderful library here can be thought of among other things as a repository of dirty tricks, because in these books are the accounts of what generals had been doing to other generals for thousands of years in the past and across much of Eurasia, and here from this library we have a famous account of the conquest of Mexico with all the details of what Cortez did to the Aztecs and what worked. That was a model for Pizarro to give him ideas what exactly to try out on the Incas, whereas the Incas without writing, had only local knowledge transmitted by oral memory, and they were unsophisticated and naïve compared to the Spaniards because of writing.
On Diamond and writing, see previous discussion here. It is highly unlikely that writing was critical:
Pizarro was illiterate
The Aztecs had writing, yet didn’t beat the Spaniards (or avoid having their leader kidnapped)
Cortes’ conquests were only a decade or so before- a short enough period that writing wasn’t necessary to communicate the lessons. Pizarro was physically present in the Americas at the time.
There’s not actually any clear pathway from “have writing” → “Atahualpa refuses to leave his army to meet with Pizarro”. Writing did not make all European monarchs cautious and immune to ambushes or kidnapping; it is not the case that the Inca didn’t understand the idea of deception.
In the linked thread, Daniel Kokotajlo suggests that the relevant difference was that the Spaniards had experience with more cultures than the Inca, and in particular were far more experienced with first contacts. This sounds plausible to me.
The most obvious example to me is a Stuart Russell slaughterbot—although those aren’t really plausible near-future technologies at this point since they already exist. Using some really good AI to control them directly (deep RL becomes good enough for effective robot control?), along with some high energy density battery storage might make them long-range and much more lethal. Though countermeasures (directed energy weapons) do exist and are being researched.
I think there’s another element to it. In Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond argued that a lot of the reason for the conquistador’s successes came down to their abilities to do things that were outside the frame of reference of the native culture, like invite the Emperor to parley and then just kidnap him. In other words, to the Inca the conquistadors exhibited a weak kind of cognitive uncontainability, furthering the analogy with AI takeover.
On Diamond and writing, see previous discussion here. It is highly unlikely that writing was critical:
Pizarro was illiterate
The Aztecs had writing, yet didn’t beat the Spaniards (or avoid having their leader kidnapped)
Cortes’ conquests were only a decade or so before- a short enough period that writing wasn’t necessary to communicate the lessons. Pizarro was physically present in the Americas at the time.
There’s not actually any clear pathway from “have writing” → “Atahualpa refuses to leave his army to meet with Pizarro”. Writing did not make all European monarchs cautious and immune to ambushes or kidnapping; it is not the case that the Inca didn’t understand the idea of deception.
In the linked thread, Daniel Kokotajlo suggests that the relevant difference was that the Spaniards had experience with more cultures than the Inca, and in particular were far more experienced with first contacts. This sounds plausible to me.