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Comment on Ask HN: Why is AI civil tech and not military first?

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Militaries tend to keep a lot of their technology secret, for some reasons:

- They don't want the enemy to also have the technology.

- They don't want the enemy to be able to plan against surprise weapons.

So, for example, if Ukraine developed a robot that looked like a wild animal, could conceal a bomb, and then walk across the border and explode at a target, they wouldn't want Russia to know. They would keep it super-secret and keep exploiting it until Russia figured out how to monitor the border for robotic animals.

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This isn't a conspiracy; it's something you can learn about by studying WWII tech development. The Nazi enigma machine is a great example: The Nazis kept it secret, and the computers that the Allies built to break the codes were also kept secret.

The same thing applies to the Manhattan project: The general public knew nothing about it, knew nothing about testing the bomb, and didn't even know about Hiroshima and Nagasaki until after the war.

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Instead, I would assume that militaries have advanced AI that we won't learn about for 5-15 years.

I would also assume so. But then again, we have all the new about OpenAI and Anthropic pitching for state contracts (including military use).

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