Even as part of the camp of LLMs plateauing scaling and ASI skeptical without new breakthroughs, the shocking reminder is that we would NOT have needed that level of intelligence for us to have catastrophically lost the controls.
The clearest analogy here would be even before the Trinity test, Klaus Fuchs was only noticed missing and found dead from radiation poisoning at an airport with blueprints and the keys to fissile materials storage, a month after the fact.
I am quite confident that the hardware level security on the foundational model weights are o... (read more)
Whilst I agree with the core of your message, that we are on the trajectory of more powerful weapons systems being "democratized", there's a fundamental missing layer that warfare and competition is a repeated game with new equilibriums.
TLDR; yes the West is under-indexed on countering drones, but even as systems get more capable offensively, defensive ones will scale to attempt to match them. If you could build a low-cost, highly autonomous offensive system, the same fundamental technology would be available to a defender. Proliferation of offensive capa... (read more)
Policy makers are not forward thinking regarding technology, and humans are very bad at predicting the future. "The fire code is written in blood".