This seems like an overly alarmist take on what is a pretty old trend of research. Six years ago there was a number of universities working on similar models for the VizDoom competition (IIRC they were won by Intel and Facebook). It seems good to track this kind of research, but IMO the conclusions here are not supported at all by the evidence presented.
The trend of research is indeed old. But in this case, my alarmism is based on the combination of the following factors:
the environment is much closer to a real battlefield than Doom etc
the AI is literally optimized for killing humans (or more precisely, entities that look and behave very much like humans)
judging by the paper, the AI was surprisingly cheap to create (a couple of GPUs + a few days of publicly available streams). It was also cheap to run in real time (1 GPU)
the research was done at a university that is doing AI research for the military
it is China, a totalitarian dictatorship that is currently perpetrating a genocide. And it is known for using AI as one of the tools (e.g. for mass surveillance of Uyghurs)
This seems like an overly alarmist take on what is a pretty old trend of research. Six years ago there was a number of universities working on similar models for the VizDoom competition (IIRC they were won by Intel and Facebook). It seems good to track this kind of research, but IMO the conclusions here are not supported at all by the evidence presented.
The trend of research is indeed old. But in this case, my alarmism is based on the combination of the following factors:
the environment is much closer to a real battlefield than Doom etc
the AI is literally optimized for killing humans (or more precisely, entities that look and behave very much like humans)
judging by the paper, the AI was surprisingly cheap to create (a couple of GPUs + a few days of publicly available streams). It was also cheap to run in real time (1 GPU)
the research was done at a university that is doing AI research for the military
it is China, a totalitarian dictatorship that is currently perpetrating a genocide. And it is known for using AI as one of the tools (e.g. for mass surveillance of Uyghurs)