Summarizer

A lot of great inventions we now take for granted initially came with little motivation other than being able to kill each other more effectively. GPS, radar, jet engines, drones, super glue, microwaves, canned food, computers, even the internet. Contrary to the narrative of the internet being about sharing science, ARPANET was pushed by the DoD as a means of maintaining comms during nuclear war. It was then adopted by universities and research labs and started along the trajectory most are more familiar with. The tale of computers is even more absurd. The first programmable, electric, and general-purpose digital computer was ENIAC. [1] It was built to... calculate artillery firing tables. I expect in the future that the idea of putting a bunch of solar into space to run GPUs for LLMs will probably seem, at the minimum - quaint, but that doesn't mean the story ends there. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

>the best we can oh, we'll sure find a way to weaponize that energy for example - just imagine all those panels simultaneously turning their reflective back in a way to form gigantic mirror to focus reflected solar energy on your enemy, be that enemy in space or on the Earth/Moon/Mars ground. Basically space-scale version of 'death ray scyscrapper' https://www.businessinsider.com/death-ray-skyscraper-is-wrea... . Back in the day the Star Wars program was intending to use nuclear explosions to power the lasers, i guess once all that solar for AI gets deployed in space we wouldn't need the explosions anymore. Interesting that such space deployment can deny access to space to anybody else, and that means that any competitive superpower has to rush to deploy similar scale system of their own. Space race v2.

Pick any Gundam series and watch the last 5 or 6 episodes, at least through the Gundam SEED/Destiny era. At least part of the plot will invariably include a space-based superweapon being deployed by one side of the war to end all wars and the the plot for a few episodes will include the other side engaging in a series of challenges to keep that from firing again and destroying it if possible.

I think the Colossus[1] predated the ENIAC but is still in line with your general theme of doing stuff for the military. In this case it was used for cipher breaking, not firing calculations. You could argue that it doesn't really count though because it was only turing complete in theory: "A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

The only purely military thing is rockets and everything space related, there's just no way private businesses would've poured so much money into it Computers and internet being storage, processing and communication systems are clearly useful for civilian purposes

Yes, but isn't that pretty much the point of the person you replied to? We know that a lot of inventions were motivated by that, and so it is incredibly myopic to not pause and try to think through the likely far broader implications.

Yes, but as Ron Perlman famously said in the beginning of Fallout, "War never changes". I would be more shocked that we eliminated war than if we achieved this version of Elon's future. It makes sense to think that we will continue to make scientific progress through war and self defense. Reason being, nothing is more motivating than wanting to survive

Not to go heads I win, tails you lose, but even if we go down this path - it's the same story because militaries are investing heavily in LLM stuff, both overtly and covertly. Outside of its obvious uses in modeling, data management, and other such things - there also seems to be a fairly widespread belief, among the powers that be, that if you just say the magic words to somebody, that you can make them believe anything. So hyper-scaling LLM potential has direct military application, same as Starlink and Starship.

I think it's much simpler: smart mass surveillance. With LLMs you can finally read and analyze all messages people send to each other

> with the telegraphy network in the early 1800s. Late 1700 actually, and war was indeed a key motivation for the deployment of the Télégraphe Chappe .

Well computers are a funny story. The groundwork had been laid and the theoretical and engineering advances that would produce programmable digital computers were well underway in the 1930s. It would have happened very soon even if there was no war, but of course WWII happened right in 1939, so obviously computers made at that time had the purpose of calculating artillery paths or decrypting German messages. But it would be incorrect to say that military applications in WWII are the reason computers were invented.

It's essentially a military network (which is why other power sphere want their own) and a way to feed money into spacex

The data centers in space is 100% about Golden Dome, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_syst...

Nope, it's 100% about building the stock valuation of SpaceX for an IPO in the face of significant risk from a cold war its CEO started on X with the U.S. federal government and increasing competition from Blue Origin, Quinfan and Guowang. DOD will play Bedrock vs Grok until there is feature parity and then make a decision not based on the features. Disclaimer: Not an Elon hater, but far from a sycophant, similar to how I felt about Steve Jobs for 40+ years.

Exactly. He can croon about DOGE all day, but the reality is his entire fortune was built on feeding at the trough of government largess. That's why he talks about Mars all the time. He's not stupid enough to think we could actually live there, but damn if he couldn't make a couple trillion skimming off the top of the world's most expensive space program.

This mofo threw a Nazi salute and danced around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw. Then he illegally downloaded the entire US treasury payment database and ran it through his AI and faced zero consequences. After promising to find a trillion in fraud and abuse, he left after less than half a year and declared there wasn't that much fraud after all. To most normal people this long history of overblown claims and complete failures would disqualify him from serious consideration. To most normal people, a massive illegal siphoning of US government data would be beyond the pale and worthy of jail time. But in today's age, there's enough smoke and mirrors that such a charlatan can just float on a sea of adulations right on past any consequences.

Exactly; most of the world's problems are political problems. Which Musk has no intention to fix, of course, because he's more about money and (buying) status with it. He had an opportunity but decided to aid the regime in extracting people's data instead (probably selling it to adversaries).

So now we get the political complications of dealing with all those countries that own ASAT weapons.