First, primitive defenses can help counter advanced offenses. Counter-drone warfare in Ukraine provides many examples: netting hung over roads, “turtle tanks” with metal sheds welded on top, inflatable decoys. These simple defenses don’t suffice, you also need interceptor drones and counter-drone teams, but they’re important. I expect miniaturized robots would be similar: you’d probably want to combine advanced defenses like bloodstream monitoring for bioweapons or ultrasonic echolocation of airborne threats with stupid defenses like thicker doors or regularly washed floors, and predicting the stupid defenses is something I reckon we can start now.
Second, even if there’s a threat for which no stupid defenses exist, I think it’s better to know about it. For example, I also worry about ant-sized robots building nuclear bombs underneath targets; I don’t see any stupid defenses against that. But we can still brace ourselves: we might recognize that cities will need to install underground metal detectors, maybe someone publishes UraniumDetectionDeviceBench, etcetera. I’d rather face known unknowns than unknown unknowns.
I don’t see how this would be tractable? Unless you had an equally powerful, aligned AI which was consistently producing defenses.
First, primitive defenses can help counter advanced offenses. Counter-drone warfare in Ukraine provides many examples: netting hung over roads, “turtle tanks” with metal sheds welded on top, inflatable decoys. These simple defenses don’t suffice, you also need interceptor drones and counter-drone teams, but they’re important. I expect miniaturized robots would be similar: you’d probably want to combine advanced defenses like bloodstream monitoring for bioweapons or ultrasonic echolocation of airborne threats with stupid defenses like thicker doors or regularly washed floors, and predicting the stupid defenses is something I reckon we can start now.
Second, even if there’s a threat for which no stupid defenses exist, I think it’s better to know about it. For example, I also worry about ant-sized robots building nuclear bombs underneath targets; I don’t see any stupid defenses against that. But we can still brace ourselves: we might recognize that cities will need to install underground metal detectors, maybe someone publishes UraniumDetectionDeviceBench, etcetera. I’d rather face known unknowns than unknown unknowns.