Eric Schmidt

So it's more efficient to use drones now than to use mortars, grenades, artillery.

That's clear.

If you just look at the economics, economics in terms of cost or effectiveness as it's called.

The next thing that happens is that both sides develop drone capabilities, which is what you're seeing now, and each then becomes a war of drone against drone.

So you have drone against anti-drone.

And so then the shift moves to how do you detect the enemy drone and how do you destroy it before it destroys you.

So the doctrine ultimately is the drones are forward and the people are behind.

And I've seen operations in, for example, sitting in Kyiv, where the Ukrainians are commanding things over Starlink, I might add, in the distant war, and they're very, very effective.

So we've solved the latency problems, we've solved the timing problems, and so forth in that area.

The ultimate state is very interesting and I don't think anyone has foreseen this.

If you go back to our conversation about RL and planning, which is what you're seeing with AI, let's say that we're on one side and we have a million drones and there's another side over here that has another million drones.

Each side will use reinforcement learning AI strategies to do battle plans.

but neither side can figure out what the other side's battle plan is.

And therefore, the deterrence against attacking each other will be very high.

Today, the way military planners operate is that they count weapons.

They say, well, you have this many, and I have this many, and you can do this kind of maneuver and so forth.

but in an ai world where you're doing reinforcement learning you can't count what the other side is planning you can't see it you don't know it and i believe that that will deter what i view is one of the most horrendous things ever done by humans which is war because unless there's a perfect balance between either side there will be some mutual destruction of the drone supply like there would be with any artillery stock and traditional warfare and whoever's left ends up winning like they're just

Well, it's very important to understand that there's no winners in war.

By the time you have a drone battle of the scale I'm describing, the entire infrastructure of your side will be destroyed, the entire infrastructure of the other side will be destroyed.

These are lose-lose scenarios.