🎇💥 Strike on Iran shows why US doesn't want to lose the AI race

You don't want to be a tech laggard in the 21st Century. Second place is first loser

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

The latest Middle East conflict started with Israel's lightning-fast conquest of Iranian airspace. Tehran's supposedly formidable air defenses proved no match for the country’s American-engineered F-35 stealth fighters. Within days, superior technology had rendered Iran's substantial arsenal of radars and missiles ineffective, even obsolete.

Then came America's coup de grâce to three Iranian nuclear sites: GBU-57 "bunker buster" bombs — 30,000 pounds of high explosives encased in a steel alloy capable of burrowing underground and then exploding — delivered by undetectable B-2 stealth bombers flying from Whiteman AFB in Missouri.

As Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a news conference, “We are unaware of any shots fired at the package on the way out. Iran's fighters did not fly, and it appears that Iran's surface-to-air missile systems did not see us. Throughout the mission, we maintained the element of surprise."

Such sophisticated warfare capabilities remain the West's exclusive preserve, underlining a war-making supremacy that no rival can match. And the edge isn’t just in jets and bombs. Satellites, electronic eavesdropping, and AI-assisted targeting served up coordinates accurate to a few feet.

Now imagine a techo-military gap far wider, thanks to artificial intelligence. Lots of folks have considered the possibility, especially if a) AI advances to something more like superintelligence and b) those advances are in militarily relevant areas even if they don’t meet some broad AGI definition: