The average life expectancy for a Russian soldier in Ukraine is between 20-30 minutes, CIA director John Ratcliffe said. Speaking at a defense summit in Pennsylvania, he attributed the deadly conditions for Vladimir Putin’s forces to Ukraine’s combat drones equipped with AI. “What I would say is, our intelligence is consistent with some of the open-source reporting you may have seen in Ukraine,” Ratcliffe said. “So the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit, right now, arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine, is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes.” “And that’s because AI-powered drones have gotten to be such specialized, low-cost killing machines. And it’s why we’re now four and a half years into that conflict,” Ratcliffe added. Ukraine said this month that Russia has lost about 1.4 million soldiers since the beginning of its full-scale invasion, with over 1,000 of the Kremlin’s troops killed or wounded almost every day. In May, Ukraine’s defense ministry said it was killing roughly 200 Russian soldiers for every kilometer of territory that Moscow claimed.
It’s not just flying drones.
I saw video of Ukraine using three tracked ground drones with machine guns in concert with multiple flying drones used to launch rockets to clear a house.
Russians were firing as they fled, but it literally doesn’t matter if you shoot a land drone, they’re mini tanks.
If/when AI is really running that shit, the oligarchs will stop pretending they think we’re the same species.
Do people realize how fucked we’d be right now if the US army was just machines who would follow any order incapable of disobeying?
Even if we had a utopian government guaranteed to always be just, someone could just hack it.
We need to make use/development of AI like this a major war crime while we still can.
If it’s the video I’m thinking of, yeah there’s not much you could do ay.
It’s frightening all right.
AI is here to stay. There is no putting that cat back in the bag
We need to stop fucking around with greedy, fascist governments
I’m guessing a new cold-war arms race is in effect. Nukes are devastating too but not used offensively except those two times.
I’m guessing we’re stockpiling drones now
Here’s another worry. Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.
Going by previous wars over many years some of them will inevitably go down the mercanary route and sell those skills to the highest bidder.
That’s why the west should step up its support to Ukraine once the war stops. All those veterans need proper care, need to be reintegrated. Need to feel seen and heard. Otherwise you’ll have a bunch of unstable personalities with a lot of knowledge on how to kill people.
The US sure as shit won’t do that. Only 18% of our veterans get the benefits they’re entitled to, and that was a pre-trump2 figure.
US developers and commercial investors (along with their European peers) are going to move on all that vacant Ukrainian real estate like Joey Chestnut on a hotdog cart. So much of what has kept Ukraine going to date has been Zelensky eating foreign debts that far exceed his country’s GDP. When the bill comes due, Ukraine’s going to be crushed harder than it was after the USSR collapsed.
The US will be more than happy to turn Ukraine into the next Israel, flooding it with western settlers and carving it up into a thousand different micro-states.
I saw another video of a robot “ultimate fighting league” recently with humanoid bots.
The two clankers went for 100% roundhouse kicks and missed almost everytime, but when they fell down?
It didn’t look real, they were back on their feet perfectly in milliseconds. It was clear the kicks was just the only scripted move, but these bots have picked themselves up off the ground probably millions of times. So that’s the only thing they currently excel at.
Eventually they’re gonna be straight up ninjas.
It’s fucking stupid to wait until we can’t beat them to try and outlaw them. We need to act now before the oligarchs literally have an army of terminators.
We need to outlaw the bots and fix wealth inequality while we still have the numbers.
Yep.
We’re already seeing this technology pop up throughout Iran, across Africa, and among both state and guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific. For all the lauding of Ukraine, the folks who are really making the most of this are Houthis and what’s left of the Wagner Group.
One of the ironies of this conflict is how many of these smaller militias are running circles around Silicon Valley tech firms - your Andurils and Mithrils and Raytheons and Northrop Grummonds. The Pentagon is spending a cool milly a unit to send up Reaper Drones that get knocked out by some particularly clever goat farmers with $200 in parts from Temu and a bootleg Starlink subscription.
Necessity breeds innovation
Greed breeds obsolescence
Restrictions make you creative, money makes you stupid.
Do they realize how fucked they would be if we all agreed to not go to work tomorrow?
Yes they do, and they also know for a fact that you will never do it.
I’m already doing it.