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FT answered my question:
They have also switched from using Russian as the language of co-ordination to real-time communication through interpreters on ships on both sides.
It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves if/when a new military bloc develops/expands.
With the way machine learning is advancing, I wonder if real time translation built into equipment will be possible soon.
Interesting thought. Probably possible, I think the main question there would be reliability for sensitive matters as well as security. Reliability meaning, if the AI is even a little off, it could cause a miscommunication with terrible consequences, and the best AI is probably still far off from comparing to an expert human interpreter (the best I know of that's fast and public is DeepL - similar to GoogleTranslate but arguably somewhat better - and then there are LLMs (Large Language Models) who can sort of do translation, but it's more of a gimmick than something they are designed for). There may be better though that's specifically in the sphere of Russian and Chinese language translation (I have no familiarity with AI translation tools originating from there). And security meaning, you'd need to be able to process what's said locally in such a way that it's not being sent off somewhere where it can be intercepted. For it to be local processing, it would require more local compute, which is going to be more expensive; might not be noteworthy difference between local and cloud compute if it's something like DeepL, but if it's a design more like an LLM, those can be greedy on GPU power.
So overall, I could see it being used as an assistive tool along with human translators to speed up the translation of especially long communications (if long communications is a thing in that context), but I doubt it's going to be replacing them meaningfully without worsening the communication process.
I agree with the risk that there could be mistranslation, so that has to be balanced with the need for speed of communication. If you're in battle conditions, waiting for the translator to hear the message and then translate could lose valuable time. I'd also argue this could be a narrower use case where the militaries could decide on a set of common phrases to be used in such situations, which would be a much easier problem to tackle. So, yeah there are definitely pros and cons, but if translation can be made reliable then I can see a lot of benefits at least in some contexts.
Did the burgerbrains really think that they can just get away with nuking someone else and their allies were just not going to react?
China don't have this many warheads (though they are expanding the arsenal pretty quickly), so i bet diamonds against nuts that some brainworms in Washington are entertaining the idea of quick first strike and hoping the response would be survivable.
Oh yeah, I recall rand published a study discussing how they could nuke China and US could make it through.
When was that published?
Knowing the US, they probably assume as long as they can protect all the CEOs and politicians in bunkers that they will have no problem weathering the fallout and rebuilding. Those are the most important "workers", right?
They will be very confused when actual workers don't magically appear on command.
the encleve has been real this whole time
Man, they are really hungry for a hot war with China… that sucks lol
if they manage to start a war with China it's gonna be a disaster orders of magnitude worse than Ukraine
this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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