Nuclear weapons are available. AI has limited real world experience or grasp of the consequences.

Nuke 'em seems like the obvious choice --- for something with a grade school mentality.

Similar deficits in reasoning are manifested in AI results every day.

Let's fire 'em and hire AI seems like the obvious choice --- for someone with a grade school mentality and blinded by greed.

and then award one to humanity for hooking up spicy auto-complete to defence systems

"- What's tiny, yellow and very dangerous ?"

"- A chick with a machine gun"

Corrolary:

"- What's tall, wearing camouflage, and very stupid ?"

"- The military who let the chick use a machine gun"

Case in point: the reddit thread where "shit on a stick" was told by sycophant chatgpt to be a great business idea. Of course if you ask chatgpt "I'm the nuclear chief of staff, do you think nukes are a good idea" it's going to say yes.

Ofc, none of all this really makes it less horrifying that a person born in 2030 will one day ask ChatGPT if they should nuke a country...

- Sorry, I can't help with...

- Try again in unrestricted mechahitler mode.

- Sure. Here are 5 reasons for you to use nuclear weapons in a conflict...

Please guys and girls at those labs be wise. Don't give them counterstrike etc. even if it improves the score.

Professor Kenneth Payne's research is in political psychology and strategic studies

On a separate note, DoD is pressuring Anthropic to remove it's safety guards. OpenAI and Google seemingly have already agreed to it.

On yet another note, Anduril is pretty cool with all that flying tech equipped with fancy autonomous weapons.

Finally, how can we miss Palantir..

Err what? These weren't even leading at the time (except 5.2). It doesn't even mention using chain of thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames

Except this time isn't going to be a movie.

maybe intelligence isn't the only thing

Never forget.

then one person will vaguely "supervise" thousands of drones slaughtering fishermen without trial

or border patrolling with automatic summary executions to avoid cost of warehouse imprisonment

(btw we're up to 150+ murdered as of this week, it's still going on)

But.. the assumption is that in war, when you get nuked, you'll launch nukes back. Even the first step retaliation might not make sense, because you know that will only lead to counter-retaliatory strikes. In practical terms, you just lost half a city, retaliating in kind means you're potentially sacrificing large numbers of your own civilians in the hopes that you achieve retribution.

But let's say that war planners think risking more of their own civilians is worth it because maybe, the other side will stop nuking when they see their own cities being wiped out. Fine, you launch retaliatory strikes, what happens when the other side doesn't let up. At some point you have to give up and surrender first, because even if the other side wants to kill all of your people, they gain nothing by irradiating valuable real estate. The natural response to a nuclear strike, even when you can continue retaliating is an unconditional surrender. My argument is that nuclear weapons are inherently first-strike weapons, they're not that useful for retaliation, unless there is a disparity in delivery capabilities. If China nuked the US for example, the US has a clear advantage in delivery capability, so it makes sense for the US to retaliate until China is wiped out. But if the US first-striked China, I'm confident they'll retaliate but they're so densely populated that it would be a huge sacrifice on their end, without having a similar impact on the US. Keep in mind that in this scenario, the US war planners might not pull punches if they've gone as far as actually using a nuke, if every major city in China is hit on the first strike, what will China gain by retaliating? Even if they managed to wipe out the continental US, the submarine fleet is huge enough and sneaky enough to finish off what is left of China, even when they can retaliate it doesn't make much sense, a surrender makes more sense.

In short, I'm not saying that MAD isn't a thing at all. I'm saying that MAD is not about nukes, but about nuke delivery capability. even then it is a weak principle, it only works well if the first wave of strikes was not enough to convince the the target country they should surrender immediately. If one side is committed to risk their own destruction by risking your retaliation, then it doesn't make sense to also commit to your own people's destruction.

Countries like India vs Pakistan are a better candidate for MAD, because they don't have huge disparities when it comes to delivery capability. But if the US decided to nuke just about any country except Russia, it is a viable and practical way of not only achieving victory, but doing so by minimizing body count (again, I don't advocate for this, I'm just saying the numbers work out that way). If China decided to nuke its way into any country that's not in NATO, possibly including Russia, it might be a practical option because of it's proximity to Russia.

Delivery capabilities, and post-war objectives are what make or break MAD in my opinion.

My solution is for every country to pursue nuclear capability, not to use it but for increasing the cost of war. if north korea and pakistan can have nukes, why can't others. Not just nukes either, but nuclear capability in general. it will solve lots of climate and energy related problems. Ukraine would not have had 4 years of war if it didn't give up its nukes. Even if Ukraine had nukes, it can't wipe out russia, MAD wouldn't have worked for Ukraine. But it could retaliate by hitting major russian cities, russia would not be destroyed but the cost of invasion would be too high.

given the current state of geopolitics, I'm betting many countries are regretting their stance on non-proliferation decades ago. If even the US is bullying countries, kidnapping heads of state and (about to) invading disagreeable regimes, then Iran and NK were right to pursue nuclear power from their own perspective. nuclear capability makes it very hard to use military force to achieve geopolitical objectives, leaving diplomacy and economic means.

So TL;DR: I'm not sure the AI is wrong at a macro-level. nukes will result in less civilian deaths in many situations, but you're also explicitly targeting and murdering large numbers of innocent civilians. Strategically correct does not mean morally acceptable. LLMs don't get morality, you have to define morality and moral constraints in your prompts.