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I think the 200 number would be .. including the offshore and big city lawyers\finacial engineers to ensure no laws are followed and no tax is ever paid.

My wife and I had a good ride yesterday. Weather was absolutely magnificent so we went to Richmond via the lovely bends of Grasstree Hill. At one point, coming the other way were half a dozen bikes which I exchanged nods with (no waving in the twisty bits!) - but the last one in line was a police bike. We don't know if he'd pulled out and was about to book them, or if it was a training ride (although they didn't look like learners), or if it was just a bored cop who decided to have a bit of fun himself. We had lunch at Pooleys vineyard, then went via Tea Tree and Brighton back to Hobart. After a coffee with Kate's brother we headed home via Taroona, which is also a great road for bikes. Very enjoyable day.

Rode into Hobart this morning to check out the vintage motorbike show in Princes Wharf #1. ( @nomadpete- on til 4pm if you want to see it, $5 entry, free parking for bikes on the forecourt). Heaps of lovely old bikes including a 1951 Vincent Black Lightning in original condition which apparently went for $1.3m at auction.

AI is a bubble that will burst within a year or so. Every person using it for free, or paying $200 a month or whatever, is being subsidised by the billions (trillions) of dollars being speculated on the investment market. All the AI companies are running huge operating losses and are not disclosing their profit and balance sheets. At some stage the true cost of infrastructure, power, water etc has to be passed on to consumers. When we have to pay $2000 or $5000 a year each for our AI subscription guess what? We will realise that we don't need it so badly. The whole thing will crash.

You can see why Kushner married into the family. Just as crooked as the rest. I read today that a Russian oligarch close to Putin funded part of Donald Jr's wedding. Funny how all the evil scum are so cosy.

Yes - these models are being built by billionaire tech bros, as a cohort possibly the most amoral set of scoundrels as exists in the USA. They are completely detached from reality. They have no concept of how normal people live. This AI race is simply a game to them. Why do they care if their company "wins" this race? They already have more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

My daughter moved into a house in Exeter yesterday with two others ahead of the start of the new academic year. I decided to use the bike to deliver some odds and sods and go for my first decent ride in a couple of months - after the best summer we have had for riding for ages. It was about an hour each way, country lanes and roads to the motorway and then through Exeter to her house. The ride on the motorway was relaxed, maintaining around 70mph. A few groups of bikes passed and we all waved to each other - excellent comradery amongst UK bikers. From the motorway, travelling to and through the main part of Exeter is a pain as it is single lane, busy and has buses. It is often little more than a traffic jam. But with the bike, filtering between the two oncoming lanes was a breeze. Cars move out of your way and when passing or facing oncoming wider vehicles (buses mainly), one just zips back in and everything is OK. Passed two police cars who waved as I went past. On the way back, the traffic was a little lighter and I was a little faster on the motorway. Weather was lovely - sunny, little wind, and about 18 degrees, although a little humid. I return the rental car today. And will go for a ride again after that. Still smiling. The dark blue was the route I took

Anyone who cares about the environment wants to STOP the building of data centres, so I'm not sure where you get your information.

Well the Pacific Ocean has had a historic quiet winter - regarding hurricanes. However there is now a very big patch of warm water making it's way across toward us. We'll see what that does to our weather. Meanwhile, at last there has been some improvement in tracking methane plumes coming from the 'natural' gas industry. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, trapping around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide and has been ignored for too long. Burning gas might produce less CO2 but there is lots of methane escaping into the atmosphere before the gas gets burned. No wonder the place is warming up. Blaming cow farts looks like a convenient diversion from the gas industry. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/sep/14/us-companies-methane-pollution-rankings

Replace "mosque" with "church", "kindergarten", or "my house" and would the tolerance be any greater?

True, but I was hoping for a more responsible group to manage it.

Who has tRumpy upset lately... apart from the Irish. This ex Rusky wrote him a open letter. Tis a pity it is lunger than donold's attention span. Hopefully someone will read it to him. https://www.ceedweb.ca/2025/08/19/eduard-topols-open-letter-to-donald-trump-why-putin-cannot-end-the-war-in-ukraine/ On August 11, 2025, Soviet-born writer and filmmaker Eduard Topol published an open letter addressed to former U.S. President Donald Trump. The letter, released by Kontinent, a Russian-language outlet in the United States. In it, Topol argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot stop the war in Ukraine, not because he does not want to, but because history shows that ending foreign wars has often triggered domestic unrest and even regime collapse in Russia. Below is the letter in full. Dear Mr. President! Dear Donald! As the author of fifty books and a dozen films about Russia, I consider myself entitled to inform you. You must know that he (Putin) cannot stop the war with Ukraine, even if you gift him your Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Trump Tower in New York, and a dozen of your golf clubs. And not because he doesn’t want a break from war, but because he simply cannot. Because he knows Russian history not from Medinsky’s textbooks, but the real one: The return of Russian troops from Europe after the victory over Napoleon led to the anti-tsarist “Decembrist” uprising in 1825. Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War led to the 1905 Revolution. The desertion of a million Russian soldiers from the Russo-German front during World War I forced Emperor Nicholas II to abdicate and caused the February Revolution of 1917. The peace signed by Lenin with Germany allowed the Bolsheviks to execute the entire royal family. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 marked the beginning of the USSR’s collapse. Knowing this, Putin cannot end the war with Ukraine and bring his troops home. Only the opportunity in May 1945 to keep almost his entire army in Europe as occupation forces helped Stalin avoid a postwar coup. That is why Putin dreams of occupying Ukraine, as well as the Baltics, Finland, Poland, etc., to keep his army far away from Moscow. He remembers how 525,000 soldiers returning from Afghanistan in 1989 turned into bandits—“Afghantsy”—who terrorized the entire population of the USSR. And he knows what will happen if one and a half million soldiers, trained to kill, loot, and rape professionally, return home from the Ukrainian front. The war with Ukraine has allowed Putin to get rid of two million of the most active opponents of his regime, whom he forced to flee Russia, while the rest of the young Russian men he either drove to the front or recruited into punitive services. Today, any war—against Ukraine, the Baltics, NATO, anyone at all—is the best way to enforce Russia’s obedience to Putin and his junta. Unfortunately, none of your advisers will explain this to you before your meeting with Putin, but you can check my arguments with Jack Matlock and Michael McFaul. I do not want Putin—a KGB man, a thief, and a murderer of millions—to keep brazenly deceiving you, lying, and misleading my President. Of course, I am not a military expert or political scientist, but I am a writer with a good memory. I remember how Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II managed to push oil prices down to $9 per barrel, gave the Afghans “Stingers,” and thereby stopped Moscow’s takeover of Afghanistan and destroyed the USSR. If you want to stop Putin and the imperial ambitions of at least half of Russia’s population, you need to do the same—bring oil prices down to at least $25 per barrel and give Ukraine the weapons that will help it crush the aggressor. As for your desire to establish U.S.-Russian business partnerships, not in words but in reality, this could happen in a hundred years—or never at all. If you are interested in why, call me and I will explain. Respectfully, EDUARD TOPOL, citizen of the U.S. and Israel

Yes.. but by my paralleing AI to guns, regulation is required to force it to slow down. However, emerging news is: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/sam-altman-elon-musk-ai-safety-concerns-b3049217.html Which basically says there is a need to slow down. The other problem is you have China and no doubt Russia and other non-aligned countries who will not slow down any time soon.. so, again in an analogy of weapons, you're only as strong as the effectiveness of what you've got. There has to be some sort of verifiable global non-proliferation agreement. Ultimately, like everything else in a free market, it takes government regulation to manage the risks.

Isn't it weird how we have flashbacks. Just now, I recalled a evening catching the number 5 tram from work when I was about 24 or 25 - so 35 years ago. It was the old W Class tram (I loved them even after the orange ones came out to replace them). On board was a conductor. Remember them? He had is brown uniform and beige-ish shirt on, with the old leather bag housing the ticket machine. He has dishevelled with thick dark brown hair, an unkempt beard but not too long. His skin was pale, and his eyebrows were thick - almost John Howard thick. I was the only pax on the tram; it was late - around 9:30 and I was on my way home. Dressed in a suit, being a new and ambitious programmer, I must have had a forlorn look on my face as he walked up to me, lent towards me and in a profound tone proclaimed, "wine, women, and song.. that is all any man needs." I have to admit, I initially felt stunned he was talking to me at all, and that feeling gave way to bemusement. But, sometimes I can;t help but feel, was that the advice I needed at the time?

A mate had a Mini Moke Californian with inentical speedo. I remember the day well. I had my left leg in plaster from a bike accident so it was stuck out the side. To say I felt a bit vulnerable would be an understatement. He wound it out til the needle was on the Full mark on the fuel gauge. Then a XJ Jag breezed past us like we were standing still! Sorry for the thread drift, but the Pic of a rusty old speedo lit up ma mrmory cell.

Young pup! Nobody expected a car to last 100,000 so there was no need for a bigger odometer. I had a friend who took a photo of his Holden odo rolling over to zero - but the car was on it's second engine.

A little thread drift, but an associate member of the EU hasn't been defined, so knowing the EU it may take a very long time, although the desire to move away from the USA may speed things up a little. But there will be hurdles. There are three freedoms that are preserved across the EU: movement of capital, movement of goods/services, and movement of people. Will these have to be included in an associate membership? If so, then your control of immigration from any EU country goes out the window. So, given Australia's very tight grip on immigration compared to other countries, the preservation of this free movement may well be a problem. The EU will need to think about things very carefully. There sort of is already associate membership - it is the European Economic Area. It allows Iceland, Norway, and Lichtenstein to basically be in the EU without being in the EU, and they are required to comply with most of the obligations of the EU. Yet they don't get to vote on the EU rules they need to comply with. Switzerland has a similar arrangement through a bilateral agreement. And of course, after the messy divorce, there is this country called Britain, which tried it's own bilateral deal, but all was offered was Switzerland's deal. So, the EU has some existing memberships and deals, that if they give special treatment to Canada in this Associate Membership status, might peeve off a couple of these others, and may trigger a whole round of renegotiations of these arrangements. And given the rising anti-EU sentiment within the EU and the rising right, if Canada gets some sort of cushy deal, well, there will be individual countries coming under pressure to leave the EU and join a cushy deal, too. Outside of a free trade agreement or similar type of bilateral arrangement, I can't see this one being negotiated and agreed upon anytime soon. These are not insurmountable problems, but the political risk for the EU is very much there.

Wot? Gee I hope the new ferries have lockable fuel caps.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8vgy3pq5ywyo There are the first steps of Canada and EU becoming very close by Canada becoming an associate member of the EU. What that means, I am not sure, but Chump's reaction was yet another tantrum. Howver' Carney's speech to the EU was priceless as it basically was the most polite sticking up of two fingers I have seen. go to 3:10 of this video: Of course, Chump came out with threats and basically throwing his toys out of the pram. But, the USA doesn't need Canada nor Europe, so he really shouldn't care.

Also, I have seen each new well burns off waste gas until they get gas clean enough to process. This can take up to a month, producing lots of CO2. It's only the final use of the gas that looks good - as long as nobody counts all the methane and CO2 lost before the gas gets to a user.

An American strikes up a conversation with a Russian tourist.... . A: "What brings you here?" R: "I come to America to study propaganda!" A: "What propaganda?" R: "Exactly!"

I could be wrong, but the way I see it, most of the job losses will be office workers. I'd think they'd be more concerned about AI putting them out of a job than blue collar workers would.

I don't know if it is a pretty wobbly financial model.. I think it is a bit like the .com (or .bomb) boom and bust. As a nascent industry where there is a lot of promise, there are a lot of players coming to market, despite the costs. Investors can see the gravy trains, but need to bet on which ones will survive. It's almost certain there will be a bust and from the ashes, a few phoenix's will rise. The bets are anthropic, despite Chump's disdain for them are going to be one of them; Open AI - not so. The success or otherwise though, in this case, won't be the consumer, but businesses. They are the ones who will fork out the big bucks to automate as long as the payback is there. And it is already for a lot of them. I can't speak about our company specifically, but if you think from SMEs to large corporates the automation capability is there now, especially in sectors that rely on information processing or content generation. Anthropic has already moved to a token based billing system where tokens pay for units of work. I think there are different token costs for say art generation versus software development. Eventually this model will probably prevail because you can work out your costs per unit of processing and apply a profit accordingly. The typical investment banking middle level contract programmer will cost around £200K/year; a permanent will cost not much different when you factor in pension, health care, holidays, training, sick, etc. If AI if 15 more efficient then I would happily pay half of my salary/contract payment bill, which runs with well into the 7 figures per year to whichever AI company we would happen to use.. It also benefits the business by being quicker to market and keeping up or beating our competitors. One of my report's sons has a job in a hedge fund or something similar as an intern. We caught up with him a couple of weeks ago and the stuff he as an intern and a developer with I think it is Claude crank out makes me wince.

Pete, that makes you half Queenslander; you might even qualify for a passport. Let me know if you need a reference.

Ironically the humans most at risk are the ones who live in the most technologically advanced countries. If the worst comes to the worst, and that's by no means guaranteed, the ones who will survive an AI catastrophe best will be those who live in the least developed countries.

Let me try to put down my thoughts. The one thing that puts us on top of the food chain is our brain. If you don't believe that, get naked and go fight any other apex predator on their turf without thinking. Now we're actively trying to develop something that is more intelligent than us. Plus we train it on the internet, which is a vast pool of humanity's worst impulses, not to mention all the misinformation and disinformation, especially since 2016. We see reports time and again of AI agents escaping their sandpits and wreaking havoc. In tests, AI agents have consistently sought to protect their own existence by any means available to them, including lying and blackmail. The creators of AI are tech companies run by morally bankrupt Silicone Valley billionaires who lined up to support the most evil and destructive administration the US has ever had. Given all this, somehow we still seem to believe that AGI will be a benign intelligence and will stay inside whatever "guardrails" we give it. To me, the possible benefits of a super intelligent entity are far outweighed by the risk to humanity.

What I think is wrong with immigration is the resistance of the "professions" to accept qualifications gained elsewhere. We have a lot of highly qualified persons doing menial work simply because those who run the "professions" set up barriers to the recognition of qualificatins gained elsewhere.

Just follow the money and you won't go far wrong.

Now Donny is blaming Zelenski for the US price of diesel. He reckons that it's all caused by Ukraine's damage to Russian refineries. At the same time as claiming US doesn't need annybody's fuel - US makes enough for its own needs at home anyway. Never let a fact get in the way of a great story.

Jeez you can be lucky (or unlucky depending on your point of view). Saturday is the day of surgery. A check in the mirror showed what little hair I have left was scruffy and over the ear, so I decided to get it cut. The el cheapo hairdresser I use charges $15 for a buzz cut. paid for by inserting $15 in notes in s lot and getting a ticket. No change given. Bank ATM's don't issue $5 notes so I had to go to Woolies and buy something so I could withdraw cash at the checkout. I also bought tonight's Powerball tickets. I went upstairs to the hairdresser and had the buzz cut, put my glasses and hearing aid back on, then sat on a seat and had a drink from the bottle I bought at Woolies. After a couple of minutes, I got up and walked to the lift to go back to the carpark level. There was quite a bit of noise in the shopping mall. I took the trolley back to the trolley bay, went and got in the car. I drove out of the carpark into the street and stopped at the lights waiting to make a right turn. I thought, "that's funny, I can't hear the indicator clicking." even thought the arrow on the dash was flashing. I felt my ear and realised the hearing aid was missing. I completed the turn, made a U-turn and drove back into the carpark. The space I had vacated was still empty, so I parked, got out and retraced my steps, back in the lift and up the the hairdressers. There was the hearing aid, on the floor beside the chair I had been sitting in. With that sort of luck I would have taken a lottery ticket had I not bought my Powerball tickets half an hour earlier.

Is he praising African-Americans and suggesting that the USA should have an African-American President? Americans know that spade is a derogatory slang term for an African-American. To paraphrase King Henry II regarding Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170, "Will no one rid me of this troublesome president?"

They should just swap the first letters - the Tronald Dump.

You've got to hand it to the Canadians. He wants his name on everything, so they've named a public toilet the Donald Trump Memorial.

The major AI developers in the US recognise the risks and don't seem to be averse to some kind of regulation or constraint on development, but none of them wants to be the first to slow down because they're all in competition with each other and have huge sums of borrowed money tied up in development with very little return on investment to show for it so far. They can't afford to stop and seem to be hoping the government will step in and do something, which the current administration certainly won't. Another reason they won't slow down is that unless there's an international agreement, which will never happen, they will be worried that China or Europe will get the upper hand. I think we're on a rocky road with great potential for positive benefits but also lots of opportunity for things to go off the rails. I saw a report today that the Houtis were using Claude to design them a new missile until Anthropic got wind of it and stopped them.

Thanks for your insight Jerry. I've been thinking in recent times about some of the points you raised, but don't have your skills in articulating it. The up side of it will be some amazing stuff no doubt. Medical advances, business, construction and engineering, and maybe no more aeroplane crashes because of software glitches. Compare space programs using AI to that movie set in the 1960's, Hidden Figures, where they used human computers. Imagining the benefits is the easier part; trying to predict the dangers and regulate them before it's entrenched is the hard part. At this stage, it's a bit like the big bad wolf offering us a big bag of lollies with one hand. It's the other hand behind his back that's the concern, and whether it's holding a big stick. The potential is certainly there for bad governments and bad actors to suppress people. In times past when it came to the subject of government interference in our lives, it's been said 'why would they bother with the average person'. That's very true when it comes to economy of scale and the high cost of doing so. It often doesn't pass the cost vs benefit test, but with advances in AI, all that cost and difficulty in pursuing it goes out the window. If it's not regulated and dealt with properly, it could lead to mass unemployment and poverty, along with the associated crime and outright anarchy. As Jerry indicated, our financial system is based around milking the punters. If those punters no longer have jobs or money to target, the whole house of cards will tumble.

I read Albo is promoting a nuclear non proliferation type agreement for AI development between USA and China at the UN.. Hmm not long after it was suggested here. Is Albo getting his policy ideas from these great fora? 🙂 The above is really interesting and tech bros wouldn't be the first and won't be the last to buy favourable regulatory treatment. It isn't right or fair, but that is life. Interestingly, from a legal perspective, at least in Aus and UK, the calling by the owners/controllers of AI for moderation or slowing of AI due to its potential dangers can be seen as admission of holding something dangerous and could well backfire. And if it escapes and causes harm by those who own it or have control over it (and saying it has got that dangerous or evolved so they lost control is no defence), they accordingly to the principles laid down in the case of Rylands v Fletcher, which is taught in High School legal studies, they will be strictly liable for it. Of course that case dealt with dangerous substances escaping from the land, but it has been successfully applied to other cases of dangerous items causing damage. This should be no different.. And given most US states are common law based (Louisianna being the Exception as a French colony) and, like Australia, often rely on older English cases for legal principle and law, they should actually keep shtum. The word processor defence is a furphy. We don't ask a word processor a question and it provides an answer without any further input from us; we simply see what we type. However, AI companies now footnote most of their initial responses with a caution that AI responses may be wrong. They may well do better to protect themselves by making sure that those disclaimers are much more prominent.

The operation is over, and I'm home again. I had trouble with the bandage coming off. It was like a turban on a basket ball. The surgeon was called in before I was released today. He said it kept coming off in the operating theatre when they were trying to put it on. He said my head was the wrong shape. Jokingly of course. Then there was the oxygen tube to my nostrils. Kept feeling like my nose was dripping. They put plastic gadgets on your legs to stimulate the blood circulation. They look like cricket pads, and inflate and deflate like a blood pressure cuff, in 3 sections, lower calf, middle calf and upper calf. Don't know what good they did, felt like a cat walking on the bed all night. I ordered grilled chicken breast and steamed vegies for dinner last night. The chicken was hard to cut, and the vegies felt like they were just waved over a steaming pot. Warm and hard. Bit into a largish broccoli floret and felt something hard. It had broken off part of a tooth. Admittedly the tooth had a cavity in it, but should not have broken off biting broccoli. I see the surgeon next Friday to have it checked even though Friday is a public holiday, then the week after go to the Cochlear centre for the outside sound processor.

I heard that it has been suggested that Australia and New Zealand also become associate members of the EU. Probably just an idle suggestion floating around in the wake of the offer to Canada.

Doctors. They are tested as much.. if not more. Ask my sister in law what she had to and continually has to go through. Some "lesser" professions they do not accept and you have to start all over again

There's a lot of money riding on a pretty wobbly financial model, so you may well be right.

If they reduce the number of overseas students, they will increase the uni fees for Australian students. My daughter is a former student at Deakin University and says Australian students pay discounted fees because foreign students paying full fees fund the universities. Take away the foreign students and the universities will have to get their funding elsewhere - Australian students or Australian taxpayers through government funding.

He even won an election that he didn't win.

All quiet on the eastern front.... The yanks have only won the Iran war-of-choice once this month?

Not really Foreman material is He? Nev

Provided you know where it's gone.

There already is. There is a small number of very wealthy tech moguls (independant of political pressure, of course) looking after all that.

At the time, a conductor's wage probably was enough.

It's all a man needs, ever...... And maybe also a little cash to buy the wine.

I had missed @Litespeed's post - sorry... I'll try and be brief (and this isn't only in reply to Litespeed's post) I don't know anyone who thinks AI is all upside; Everyone I have spoken to; all articles I read on it see many of the downsides and have grave concerns. I have said on these fora many times we are at critical mass with AI and certainly jobs are going to go. Leaving out the nefarious uses, the question is whether or not the positives outweigh the negatives. @willedoo is correct - the developments over the next few years are going to change (or reinforce) what we are discussing today. China was reported a few weeks ago to make it illegal to use AI to displace jobs in an existing company. Great, most companies will simply create new companies to do that; it will be interesting to see how China responds to that, or if it was a face saving thing for the plebs. But, if we look at the potential huge displacement of jobs and think about countries like Australia.. Our economies are set up so the population from the upper to lower middle classes largely pay. It is here where most of the jobs or SME businesses will be lost. The governments will be faced with a double fiscal whammy - collapse in revenue and unprecedented demand in welfare. It is how those governments respond that will determine the impact of AI socially. For example, to stem the fiscal oceans of red ink, they may simply clamp down on welfare payments. That would put a heck of a lot of people who are more educated, vocal, and canny than the usual people who fall victim to these vents on the poverty line, and that will not bode well for them. MPs will fear losing their jobs to the protest parties will heap pressure on the governing ministers and when they see they will be on a loss in the same way SFM back flipped on EVs, they will have to do something drastic. In other words, the foundation of the economy today is based on the middle income PAYG/PAYE take; that will massively fall; something has to be done. So, I would suggest rather than facing a revolt of its citizens and losing its job, the government will seek to rebalance how revenues are brought in.. and will have to think about the living wage. That will mean the bulk of the workforce become lazy idle bar stewards and society will collapse, right? Well, maybe not. There have been experiments of putting whole towns on the living wage, and it turned out, people are far more enterprising than we give credit for. But, now we have a situation of, if you are now taxing who we should be today, and they are covering the mass unemployment with the living wage, there could be another benefit. Believe it or not, this is now moving into the realms of privatised communism.. which is what I guess capitalism really is anyway. If everyone has a living wage, it was found in experiments that general health improved as people would exercise more and take more time to eat properly. They also found, just like communist states such as Yugoslavia were before those regions went to capitalism, the normal domestic crime rates were much lower than in our current societies because the population had (and felt) the security of a roof over their head, food in their stomachs, clothes on their back and enough left over to participate in society. Experiments were too short to determine impacts on mental illnesses that lead to drug abuse, homelessness and the like. And, it would necessitate a redistribution of wealth rather than concentration (although relying on that alone results in diminishing returns, but there are other industries, too). On the nefarious side, such as mass lethal weapons, etc.. we already have that.. Nuclear weapons were the fear of world destruction from the 60's to about the 90's. However, while it got close in Cuba, there were two main reasons world destruction hasn't taken place yet. Firstly, the deterrence effect.. The good side and the bad side (take your pick which one is which) both have them and they know that they will annihilated too if they were to use them. The second reason is neither side knows how good the other side's really are. They could could be bluffing, they could be as they are bragging, or they could be wildly understated. They may be well maintained and modern, or they may be rusted and unable to escape their silos, launch racks, etc. There have been many conventional and guerilla wars since nukes have been around, but apart from some tests, none have been fired yet. I don't see AI any different in this way. All sides will have it, they won't know what each other really has, but AI on each side is likely to monitor for attacks from the other side and launch accordingly. This could be traditional but unmanned weapons/vehicles, or could be through infrastructure attacks. Add nuclear into the equation, and I think countries will be too scared try it out on the other side for fear of what they will bring on themselves. What I find is more threatening is the state surveillance and violence on its own. Already in democracies, governments have used terrorism acts to suppress natural and transparent justice on its citizens. Facial recognition, etc. is already deployed. Deploying further AI technology can become quite invasive, and while it may be for good intentions (e.g. anti-terrorism operations), if they screw up they can cover up, or the government/enforcement agencies can become nefarious (think of Stasi, ICE, etc). And this can be private as well - criminals and criminal gangs, perverted rapists and the like.. This for me is the one downside I find very had to find a potential defence against. My point is AI is like guns.. AI doesn't do the damage.. it is the people in control that can inflict or protect from the damage. Time will tell.