It might well be, yes -- it's a long time now, I have read all his published novels except maybe in the last couple of years, and I am not sure which one is which.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge and Accelerando by Charles Stross both have a lot of parallels with current AI and Internet developments, and are great books to boot. Accelerando has free ebook versions available, which I am happy to share, thanks to the author and publisher. I can’t recommend cstross highly enough. Vinge needs no introduction, though the work mentioned is somewhat less well known and later than his more renowned works.
To be fair, we don’t have many government mules these days, but it wasn’t always so, and not so long ago.
The current amount of horsepower on the hoof is a rounding error, but before mechanized farming and war-fighting, these distinctions were the difference.
If we consider the capacity of technology to act as a force multiplier, it is reasonable to assume that current and future AI-assisted fighting forces can achieve more with less traditional materiel and with fewer personnel.
Drones are an especially likely way that these many AIs will become embodied and diversify, in which case I don’t think the percentages are so far-fetched.
> Further ahead in the future, it wants its machines to be programmed to travel autonomously to a location, carry out its task - such as watching out for advancing enemy soldiers and engaging them if necessary - and then return to base after a certain time.
> I’ll start working on an HN comment in a few weeks and try to remember to post it back to this thread
iirc HN threads automatically close, due to inactivity and (/or?) based on time since the original post. I wasn’t able to find a thread with the comments still open from 16 days ago, let alone a “few weeks”, but in good faith I’m assuming that you already know that, and aren’t using that as an out to avoid replying, not that anyone is “owed” a reply by you, or by anyone.
This is all to say, I appreciate the thread as a bystander, and would thus naturally eagerly await your reply if and when it arrives before the closure of individual this post’s comment section.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
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