I think it's more a horizon zero dawn scenario, where they modernize the military with drones and AI until there's a bug in the code, and oops our killer bots have wiped out the biosphere. When the only reason the killer bots were being used was for corporations to wage minor wars against each other in the pursuit of increasingly smaller ecological niches.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 8 hours ago

I agree with aspects of that comparison as well.

Probably not likely to get to the point of like... an entire robotic fascimile ecosystem...

But ... we are now beyond the Terminator scenario:

Multiple nation states are right now implementing AI at many stages of the 'kill chain' information passing and decision making structures of their militaries, in targetting systems, in all kinds of drones, land air sea... not to mention the actual Skynet type scenario of attempting to detect and intercept missiles.

In Terminator, the system like... gains awareness and escapes into everything computer.

We are just voluntarily putting it into everything, it wouldn't even have to really 'escape'... just have one of these systems majorly fuck up, and that'd trigger a cascading chain of other AI systems fucking up and or responding reasonably to some other system's fuck up.

...

There are other reasons for using AI in things like drones though:

You can jam a remote controlled drone, blast it with EM/radio waves to confuse the shit out of it, sever connection, or be more clever and hack into it, hijack it.

So... the cheap solution to this appears to be spools of fiber optic cables, sorta like a TOW missile, such that you just actually have a direct, wired connection the whole time.

But that obviously doesn't work at all ranges and for all types of drones... so... just let them think for themselves, what could go wrong??!

[–] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 7 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

its much more lame, what state-like power does Musk have? None. All the corps in Cyberpunk have equivalent powers to nation-states, their own armies. McPolice and all.

i think closest to that irl currently is Palantir and some of the MIC Corps but they don't fight their own wars yet.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

Fair points.

Lets say Musk aspires toward Militech, lol?

EDIT:

But also, Musk did just literally have his goons be allowed to waltz in to damn near every government database of any kind and probably make offsite copies of all of that data.

So... that's your much more state-corpo nexus right there, granted this relationship / level of access turned out to be temporary.

Unless his goons gave themselves backdoors, or exposed accidental backdoors to... basically anyone, by ripping up the security systems with granted god mode admin, in order to be able do what they wanted.

Which... seems to actually be what they did, what happened.

EDIT 2:

PMCs very much are their own military/police forces.

You just don't often hear about them and what they do, because they tend to have decent OPSEC and media control.

Like uh, 03, Katrina.

Blackwater just deployed to New Orleans, started shooting 'looters' and going around breaking into houses and 'securing' firearms.

They did this for a period of time with no actual prior mandate or authorization.

Said mandate and authorization were formally given by the government several days to weeks after they just fucking deployed themselves, and then formally offered their services...'We're already on the scene, sir' type shit.

[–] FuckyWucky@hexbear.net 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (1 children)

true, i think many billionaires want such kind of power, but i think for now they prefer to influence Government policy, and many ways it works better, i.e. no corpo-wars.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 14 hours ago

Sorry I may have now made two additonal uh, 'content updates' to what you replied to, in the time yoh made your reply, but yeah, it seems like we are on roughly the same page here.

[–] sommerset@thelemmy.club 11 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I don't understand this reference 😭

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Very broadly and roughly, in Cyberpunk 2077, Militech is... more or less the entire US military industrial complex, but all consolidated / merged into one huge megacorp.

Like ... imagine if Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, General Motors, Ford, Colt, Smith & Wesson, Palantir, Anduril, Blackwater/Xi/Academi/Constellis, SpaceX, KBR...

... were all just subdivisions of one huge holding corporation.

And then they just had a SuperPAC, and a political party to go along with it.

...

A whole lot of the... actual world building of most good cyberpunk fiction is ... well, either the logical conclusion of neoliberal economic trends if you're cynical/realistic, or a horrific and grotesque nightmare exaggeration... if you're optimistic/a naive liberal.

Most people just see the fanciful body augmentations and super technologies and go 'wow, cool!' at that, though.

...

But anyway, a megacorp is basically just an Anglicized way of saying 'Keiretsu'; Japan's giant conglomerates of ... basically a family of manufacturers, service providers, and banks that all work with each other as a sort of intracorporate family, or feudal fiefdom.

Much (most?) early cyberpunk pretty directly made clear their model for a 'megacorp' was corporate Japan in the 80s.