Recent goings-on in Russia/Ukraine and Iran make it clear a small-time actor can create a big threat. Basically, just about anyone with a modest amount of resources can shut down the Straits, for example.Bootstrap wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2026 7:31 pm To me, this is a reminder that:
1. Drones and similar weapons are available to a lot of people.
2. This makes some kinds of terrorism possible now that were not previously possible. Whether or not these people were actually in a position to deploy their plan or not, which is not yet clear to me, this can happen in the future.
3. Political violence may get a lot more scary.
The threat landscape is changing.
It will make peacemaking a lot harder, because even if the majority want to strike a peace deal, a rogue element can launch attacks that ruin the peace.
There is some evidence that AI is driving decisions being made by the U.S., Iran, and Israel, and AI experts have warned for a while that AI-based decision making in war could lead to problems with perpetual stalemates or being unable to hold ceasefires.
One of the worst things to contemplate is fully autonomous, AI-driven drones or other similar types of weapons, which can carry out a mission disconnected from a human operator for potentially a long period of time, including a long waiting period before activation. The cat is already out of the bag - the amount of computer equipment needed to create an autonomous drone, complete with advanced vision, pattren recognition capabilities, able to read and comprehend news events, etc. is modest (maybe $10,000 for the computer part in order to run very advanced AI). And, of course, arms-races mean the superpowers will think they need to build their own stronger and stronger AI systems to fight back at this.