You could. This type of gun is not intended primarily for use against people (although this particular gun might be modified to serve the role of a sniper rifle). It’s for shooting aircraft and lightly armored vehicles. By that I don’t mean cars; I mean armored personnel carriers. The bullets would go right through a building’s walls.

I can’t quickly find a photo of this gun’s 12.7 mm bullet doing its thing, but here’s what the very similar American 50 cal bullet does to six-inch-thick concrete:

My guess is that they didn’t answer your question because they had strict instructions not to stray from the script on this topic. Saying the wrong thing could lead to a big PR problem, so I don’t expect that people working in this field would be willing to have a candid public discussion even about topics to which they have given a lot of thought. I do expect that they have given the ability of AI to obey orders accurately a lot of thought at least due to practical (if not ethical) concerns.

I mean, I am currently willing to say “the AIs will almost definitely kill civilians but we should build them anyway” because I don’t work in defense. However, even I’m a little nervous saying that because one day I might want to. My friends who do work in defense have told me that the people who gave them clearance did investigate their online presence. (My background is in computational biochemistry but I look at what’s going on in AI and I feel like nothing else is important in comparison.)

As for cold comfort: I think autonomous weapons are inevitable in the same way that the atom bomb was inevitable. Even if no one wants to see it used, everyone wants to have it because enemies will. However, I don’t see a present need for strategic (as opposed to tactical) automation. A computer would have an advantage in battlefield control but strategy takes hours or days or years and so a human’s more reliable ability to reason would be more important in that domain.

Once a computer can reason better than a human can, that’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s also inevitable like the atom bomb.

The federal government uses the term “terminate” rather than “revoke” to describe the decision not to extend TPS, but even the article the OP posted (which is very critical of Trump’s plan) interprets what he said as “not extend”.

Now Trump plans to forcibly uproot this group of roughly 18,000 people who pay taxes, own homes, have jobs, and support their families. But that’s only the beginning: Up to 2.7 million people could lose protection from deportation if Trump allows immigration programs such as Temporary Protected Status, DACA, and humanitarian parole to lapse during a second term, according to Forbes.

The interviewer was the one who used the word “revoke” but Trump does seem like the kind of person who could attempt to end the TPS designation early rather than waiting for it to simply expire a year into his term. Such an attempt would have very little chance of success. Decisions to terminate (as opposed to revoke early) TPS status during Trump’s past presidency are still going through the courts (see Ramos, et al. v. Nielsen, et al.) and not in effect.

Trump and the interviewer are talking about Temporary Protected Status, which is temporary.

A TPS designation can be made for 6, 12, or 18 months at a time. At least 60 days prior to the expiration of TPS, the Secretary [of Homeland Security] must decide whether to extend or terminate a designation based on the conditions in the foreign country.

Source.

TPS eligibility for people from Haiti will last until February 3, 2026 unless it is extended. If during a Trump presidency, the federal government does not extend TPS for Haiti, it would be acting well within its established authority.

I’m not saying they aren’t intended to be used in combat. Of course they (or more sophisticated future robots for which they are the prototypes) are. I’m saying that they’re not being used in combat right now.

a full-scale total war in the middle east, possibly even beyond that

Who else would enter the war on Iran’s side? It doesn’t have any powerful allies among the other Middle Eastern countries, which rightly perceive it as an ideological rival and a would-be regional hegemon, and its proxies appear to be doing as much as they can already.

I think Iran is vulnerable because it overplayed its hand. Thus a war now may be better than dealing with Iran as a nuclear power later.

Despite media speculation, Israel is not currently planning to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to four Israeli officials, even though Israel sees Iran’s efforts to create a nuclear weapons program as an existential threat. Targeting nuclear sites, many of which are deep underground, would be hard without U.S. support. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an attack by Israel on Iranian nuclear sites.

I wonder what the strategy here is, given that the USA also wants to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons. Is the implication here that the USA will not enable an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities as long as Iran doesn’t actually try to build a bomb? How confident are Israel and the USA that Iran can’t build a bomb in secret? Is there a way Iran could retaliate against an attack on its nuclear facilities but not against an attack on other major targets?

That and the following make me suspect that this is a faked publicity stunt rather than a real prototype.

“The purpose of building this tool is not for misuse, and we are not releasing it,” Nguyen and Ardafiyo write in a document explaining the project. Instead, the students say their goal is to raise awareness that all this isn’t some dystopian future — it’s all possible now with existing technology.

PimEyes doesn’t search Facebook. You can try it for yourself. It will show you matching faces for free, but you have to pay to find out where it found them.

a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, armed with what appears to be an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on rotating turret undergoing “rehearsals” at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia

They’re not being used in combat.

With that aside, I appear to be the only one here who thinks this is a great idea. AI can make mistakes, but the goal isn’t perfection. It’s just to make fewer mistakes than a human soldier does. (Or at least fewer mistakes than a bomb does, which is really easy.)

Plus, automation can address the problem Western countries have with unconventional warfare, which is that Western armies are much less willing to have soldiers die than their opponents are. Sufficiently determined guerrillas who can tolerate high losses can inflict slow but steady losses on Western armies until the Western will to fight is exhausted. If robots can take the place of human infantry, the advantage shifts back from guerrillas to countries with high-tech manufacturing capability.

I have not come across facial recognition software that contains Facebook pictures in its database. I don’t mean to be creepy, but I’m curious about which software you’re referring to.

Wow, I think that’s a modified DShK, which entered service in 1938. It’s not a museum piece - these guns are still in widespread use.

You can plug the body back on for the next time.

What do you mean? Are you reconnecting two halves of a cut tube of toothpaste somehow?

If it’s stupid and it works…

Public databases have photos of people’s faces? Or do they mean private but with access available for purchase? I didn’t think those had photos either but I’ve never paid for access so I don’t know.

☑Make a list.

The Washington Free Beacon makes no attempt to present itself as non-partisan but does provide photos. I can’t verify that those photos are authentic but I assume that the NYT, CNN, etc. have verified them before publishing this story.

Edit: I also found this additional newspaper clipping, which appears to be the source for the following claim:

And a story published in another Nebraska paper on August 11 that year said he would “leave Sunday en route to China” after having “about given up participating [in WorldTeach] earlier this summer during the student revolts in parts of China.”

It’s pretty tame, and I wouldn’t even have been sure that it was meant to be critical of Trump rather than a misguided attempt to support him if the article hadn’t said so.

Doing things like this when you’re certainly being recorded is a great idea. Wait, hold on…