What worked on my friend (in other words, what pissed my friend off) was saying "Why don't you..." and then proposing something other than what he was doing, with bonus points for proposing an idea that came to mind there and then without thinking about it much.
ArbitraryValue
His inability to speak clearly and his frequent desire to be pointlessly cruel are both reasons I won't vote for him, but I do think it's important to note that he's not proposing to deport permanent residents.
My guess is that they didn't answer your question because they had strict instructions not to stray from the script on this topic. Saying the wrong thing could lead to a big PR problem, so I don't expect that people working in this field would be willing to have a candid public discussion even about topics to which they have given a lot of thought. I do expect that they have given the ability of AI to obey orders accurately a lot of thought at least due to practical (if not ethical) concerns.
I mean, I am currently willing to say "the AIs will almost definitely kill civilians but we should build them anyway" because I don't work in defense. However, even I'm a little nervous saying that because one day I might want to. My friends who do work in defense have told me that the people who gave them clearance did investigate their online presence. (My background is in computational biochemistry but I look at what's going on in AI and I feel like nothing else is important in comparison.)
As for cold comfort: I think autonomous weapons are inevitable in the same way that the atom bomb was inevitable. Even if no one wants to see it used, everyone wants to have it because enemies will. However, I don't see a present need for strategic (as opposed to tactical) automation. A computer would have an advantage in battlefield control but strategy takes hours or days or years and so a human's more reliable ability to reason would be more important in that domain.
Once a computer can reason better than a human can, that's the end of the world as we know it. It's also inevitable like the atom bomb.
The essence of the message itself is simple: Warning, dangerous materials are buried below.
The warnings will be heeded about as much as the curses in ancient Egyptian tombs were.
Still others advised against erecting any warning monuments at all, worrying that the markers themselves— if not properly interpreted— may rouse the curiosity of their discoverers enough that they might explore further, to disastrous ends.
The best idea, IMO.
I'm not saying they aren't intended to be used in combat. Of course they (or more sophisticated future robots for which they are the prototypes) are. I'm saying that they're not being used in combat right now.
a full-scale total war in the middle east, possibly even beyond that
Who else would enter the war on Iran's side? It doesn't have any powerful allies among the other Middle Eastern countries, which rightly perceive it as an ideological rival and a would-be regional hegemon, and its proxies appear to be doing as much as they can already.
I think Iran is vulnerable because it overplayed its hand. Thus a war now may be better than dealing with Iran as a nuclear power later.
Despite media speculation, Israel is not currently planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat. Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.
I wonder what the strategy here is, given that the USA also wants to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Is the implication here that the USA will not enable an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as long as Iran doesn't actually try to build a bomb? How confident are Israel and the USA that Iran can't build a bomb in secret? Is there a way Iran could retaliate against an attack on its nuclear facilities but not against an attack on other major targets?
That and the following make me suspect that this is a faked publicity stunt rather than a real prototype.
“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” Nguyen and Ardafiyo write in a document explaining the project. Instead, the students say their goal is to raise awareness that all this isn’t some dystopian future — it’s all possible now with existing technology.
You could. This type of gun is not intended primarily for use against people (although this particular gun might be modified to serve the role of a sniper rifle). It's for shooting aircraft and lightly armored vehicles. By that I don't mean cars; I mean armored personnel carriers. The bullets would go right through a building's walls.
I can't quickly find a photo of this gun's 12.7 mm bullet doing its thing, but here's what the very similar American 50 cal bullet does to six-inch-thick concrete: