Dwain Northey (Gen X)

So, let’s talk about another Generation X nightmare but now it has a new twist.

Remember the Mathew Brodrick 1983 movie WarGames, where a dumb kid got into a strategic computer system and asked it to play Thermonuclear War. The resolution was getting the program to play Tic-Tac-Toe repeatedly until it learned the futility of the game.

That was primitive AI in relation to the massive computing power of today’s massive systems. On December 8, 1987, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in Washington, D.C. The final treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons, restricting the deployment of both intermediate and short-range land-based missiles worldwide. Well for all the bluster of that treaty the proliferation of nuclear weapons hasn’t stopped and now more than 2 major players have the capability of committing a nuclear strike which could set off a global nuclear war.

Ok that’s terrifying but what does that have to do with a 1983 movie? Well let me tell you. Every time we develop a new and better technology one of the fist things that the mind of man applies it to is warfare. Did you know that the Soviets had and probably still do what is called a Dead Hand Strike option? What that is, is a protocol that if their strike system detects an opposition strike that destroys the Kremlin that it will automatically launch all nuclear weapons at all designated targets, mutually assured destruction. Nice way to play, ‘If we die. We all Die’.

That isn’t the scariest part of this cicero… see when we started this game of life extinction chicken the response time from one government starting a strike against another was hours, with nuclear submarines and new technology the response time is minutes. Those minutes are not enough time for a cogent human response to react to or call off the strike, so we have turned that over to AI. There is an article in the Atlantic about AI not having the launch codes and it paints a ‘Skynet’ future that I don’t think we want. Below is a link to the article. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/06/ai-warfare-nuclear-weapons-strike/673780/

I really wish that we could spend as much time and effort trying the make the world a better place than dreaming up better and more efficient ways to kill each other.

Sorry for another bummer post.