Present tense

So real quick, genuine question: where exactly are the massive AI robot armies? No seriously, where are they? Where are they being manufactured en masse, and who is handing them guns and bullets, because—wait, I’m sorry, oh, are they not using guns and bullets? Are they using laser beams? Rail guns? Are the robots going to show up with some kind of directed energy weapon system that somehow hasn’t made it into any defense procurement budget I’ve ever seen reported or had its plans leaked by some disgruntled underpaid and overworked engineer?

Please, walk me through the weapons systems. Explain to me, in detail, the complete logistical chain by which a bodiless AI network transitions into a fully formed and armed, mobile, physically-present fighting force capable of projecting lethal force across vast populated territories against a hostile and distributed human population, because I am genuinely all ears and I have not seen the part where that happens yet.

And while you’re at it, please explain where the ammunition comes from, because last I checked those stockpiles are already dwindling thanks to the Iran War, aiding Ukraine (the just thing, but irrelevant to my point here), and we haven’t even gotten to the robot uprising yet.

And before anyone pulls up a Boston Dynamics video: a proof of concept demo is not a full scale deployable fighting force. A robot doing parkour in a lab or even on a playground outdoors is not an occupying army. Citing cool engineering projects as evidence of imminent AI subjugation of the human race is the technological equivalent of seeing a Wright Brothers prototype and concluding that air superiority has already been achieved. It hasn’t. We’re nowhere close. That’s not a defense of AI, that’s just reality. A reality dickheads at Palantir and elsewhere want you to believe.

Maybe I’m ignorant here—and I truly welcome being corrected—but there is absolutely a miles-wide, canyon-deep, cosmically-significant difference between predictive analytics and pattern-recognition models making executive decisions inside a bodiless computer network on some bumfuck nowhere server-farm, and battle-ready physical machines with the equivalent of bones, muscles, nerves, the capacity for locomotion, the ability to take damage and keep going, hands that can grip and choke and pull a trigger, legs that can chase, eyes that can track, and all the terrifying biological hardware that comes with inhabiting an actual physical body in actual physical space, trying to subjugate millions upon millions of pissed off, cornered, living breathing human beings who have been on this planet for millions of years and who are, at their absolute baseline, one of the most inherently violent and catastrophically unpredictable species this world has ever produced and who historically do not respond well to being cornered.

The much more dangerous and immediate and actually-happening-right-now threat is not a robot army or AGI suddenly taking over like Skynet. It is armies of brainwashed, racist human beings in overfunded paramilitaries like ICE or the IDF using AI decision-making and augmented targeting tools to identify, track, repress, or murder other human beings.

That is not science fiction. That is the present tense. That is the thing we should be losing sleep over right now. That is what every single American, and frankly, every single human being on the planet should be pushing back against as much as possible.

We all need to stay focused on what is actually in front of us: the Epstein-class billionaire parasites buying governments wholesale, the racists and their paramilitaries doing the physical work, and the propagandists and foot soldiers in Congress providing the legal cover. Those are the present tense dangers. The present tense threats to humanity.

Concerns about AI are real, legitimate, and absolutely deserve serious discussion. But we need to approach all of it with nuance, pragmatism, and an honest reckoning with what the technology actually is and actually isn’t right now, and not a Marvel-adjacent, Hollywood-fever-dream grasp of a subject that is complicated enough without the Terminator getting involved.

TLDR; A language model is not going to show up at your door. The ICE agent with an AI targeting system might. Stay focused, people.