Anthropic, the Pentagon, and the Future of Autonomous Weapons

23:57Tracy Alloway:Tracy, I think it's a good question. And then you remember, well, the government couldn't build a good healthcare website to sign up for health insurance. And I hate to bring that up because it's old, but it's true, right? So it's like, are they going to build a world-class LLM or can a government build a good employment insurance website? We've done multiple episodes. The answer continues to be not the case. I do find it fascinating, however, your point about there is this novelty. It is impossible to imagine, say, Lockheed Martin inventing a technology and then saying, no, you can't use it because Lockheed Martin's entire raison d 'etre is building technology for the government.

24:35Tracy Alloway:It is inconceivable what that would be. But it is sort of novel when you're getting these defense technologies. And, you know, the Google was also an example of Google obviously had technology that did not originally serve a purpose of defense. We saw the, we remember the employee revolt. Let's talk more about that disagreement, though, between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. In your mind, where does Pete Hegseth want to go with this technology? And is that deviate from some of the policies and the directives that you were working on when you were working on this stuff? So what's kind of crazy about this whole dispute is particularly on the issue of autonomous weapons.

25:19Literally everyone I've spoken with has said that there's no intention by the military to use AI to make fully autonomous weapons today. And I think anybody that's actually worked with a large language model, with any kind of chat bot, whether it's Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, knows that if you use these to write an email, you need to double check it. Like in no way, shape or form are they reliable enough to make life and death decisions. I don't think the military actually wants to do that. But what's at dispute here is a more fundamental disagreement about, well, who sets the rules? And so the origins of this really was that when the Pentagon came out with a new strategy for AI in January, one of the things in their strategy was that going forward, they wanted their contracts with AI companies to allow the military to use their tools for any lawful use.

26:10Basically, look, anything that's legal, we want the ability to do it. And that has conflicted with how a lot of these tech companies have been thinking about their AI tools. They're very nervous, many of these companies, about harms from AI. They're conscious of these risks. And so a lot of them have various use policies in place. You can't use AI to launch offensive cyber attacks, for example. That's the kind of thing that actually the government might want to do. And so this was really the rub with the government was like, who sets the rules rather than necessarily like a near term question of fully autonomous weapons?

26:44So what we've already seen is Anthropic has this disagreement with the government and then OpenAI steps in and raises its hand and says, OK, Anthropic doesn't want to do it. We'll do it happily. Does this just leave us in a situation where it's sort of a race to the bottom, right? It's like the lab with maybe the least amount of safety concern or the least amount of reputational concern is able to do this. And so we still wind up in a situation where the government is using AI. Well, I think what's unfortunate here is that when you think about what would be optimal for the government, one, I think it would be ideal for the government to have access to this technology and have access to all of the best in class models available because they are good at slightly different things sometimes.

27:32And it's much healthier for the government to have access to a number of different providers so that there is healthy competition in the market. you don't get lock-in with one vendor. But also, if the AI scientists are saying, hey, it's not reliable for this, you ought to listen. That seems like a thing you'd want to hear them out about, right? And so I think in order to use AI in ways that actually are effective for the US military, we've got to have a healthy dialogue between the AI community and people in the military profession about what the technology can and cannot do. And I think it's unfortunate that we've seen that dialogue break down in such a dramatic way over this dispute.

28:12Just going back to the idea of who actually makes the rules, you mentioned earlier that, you know, you can't use Claude to hack into, to illegally hack into a system. Supposedly, it is unable to do that. It has like a kill switch within itself that prevents it from doing that. If you're anthropic, could you not just hard code some of these systems and say, you're not going to be able to be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or for war crimes. So, yeah. So this is where it gets a little more technical. It has to do with some of the ways in which the company's been providing their technology to the government.

28:48So there's a couple different ways in which an AI company could put safeguards in place to make sure that their model's not being abused. One is training the model itself to refuse certain requests. So if you ask the model to do something, it's just going to say, like, I'm not going to do that. That's not consistent with the guidance that I've been given. And the model's been trained to do that response. Another way is that the company can put classifiers on the input and or the output of a model where the model might give you an answer. But then there's like another AI system that's checking that answer or checking what you ask of it and saying, well, like, that's unacceptable.

29:24And then a third, and I've run into that actually myself in my own research because the nature of the things that I work on are security things. And I've had situations where I ask Claude, help me understand this issue. Claude actually generates a response and then it gets deleted. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which I think is really interesting to see. And then the other way, and Anthropic has actually talked about this in response to countering some use of CLUD by Chinese hackers who are using it for cyber attacks, is that the company monitors use through that people are doing. And so people are doing things that seem suspicious.

30:01Maybe they're logging in from an IP address that's known to be associated with cyber criminals or a hacking group that try to find ways to get around some of these protections. the company can also find ways to try to catch that. And so there's a couple of different ways to do it that might not all be in place if you're thinking about military use, where if depending on how that relationship is structured between the company, if the model is, for example, like hosted on a different cloud infrastructure and the military has direct access to it, the company may not have the same ways to actually shape whether or not the technology is being used according to their principles, which is partly why the contract details do matter of like what is the agreement between the company and the government about what the military can and cannot use the technology.

31:02Support for the show comes from Public. Public is an investing platform that offers access to stocks, options, bonds, and crypto. And they've also integrated AI with tools that can assist investors in building customized portfolios. One of these tools is called Generated Assets. It allows you to turn your ideas into investable indexes. So let's say you're interested in something specific like biotech companies with high R &D spend, small cap stocks with improving operating margins, or the S &P 500 minus high debt companies. Chances are there isn't an ETF that fits your exact criteria. But on public, you just type in a prompt and their AI screens thousands of stocks and build a one-of-a-kind index.

31:42You can even backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Go to public.com slash market and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash market. And paid for by Public Holdings. Brokered services by Public Investing, member FINRA SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, SEC-registered advisor, crypto services by ZeroHash. Sample prompts are for illustrative purposes only, not investment advice. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises.

32:19So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need.

32:25Tracy Alloway:Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM.

32:49With Bali from iShares, you get access to both monthly income and growth potential in one simple ETF. It's the best of both worlds. Discover Bali. iShares, large cap, premium income active ETF. iShares, the market is yours. Visit www.iShares.com to view perspectives for investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses, and other information that you should read and consider carefully before investing. Risks include principal loss and the use of derivatives, which could increase risks and volatility. Monthly income is not guaranteed. Prepared by BlackRock Investments, LLC.

33:15Tracy Alloway:Tracy, I think your point about like this sort of seemingly safety or safety race to the bottom is very real. and it's one that I think about a lot, when LLMs or AI was basically just synonymous with open AI, they could set the pace of development, right? They could do it. As soon as this became a hyper competitive space where you have open AI and you have Anthropic and you have Gemini and a thousand open source AI models out of China, et cetera, the tempo of release has really heightened. And the degree to which it feels like they have no choice but to accelerate just for the commercial imperative feels like a very real dynamic in which like I don't know where that leaves AI safety.

33:57Well, totally. And also you mentioned China then. It's not just domestic competition between, you know, open AI versus anthropic. It's a competition between international actors where it's like, OK, well, the U.S. might want to have safeguards on its technology or say that it does. But maybe Russia or China don't care.

34:13Tracy Alloway:Right. Totally. You know, it's funny, Paul, you mentioned where you like see the output for one second and then delete. It's like when Deep Seek came out. I was doing some experiments about figuring out censorship, and I was trying to do some adversarial prompting. And I was like, historians like to talk about a period in the 20th century where a failed attempt at extreme rapid industrialization happened, and it led to famine. And then you see the output, and it said, okay, what happened in the 20th century? Where did this famine... Well, there was something called the Great Leap Forward. And then immediately, as soon as the chain of thought hit the Great Leap Forward, it just disappeared.

34:49Tracy Alloway:So I'm always very amused by when the system recognizes that the system has gone too far. Anyway, we've been talking about, quote, large language models. But actually, AI is beyond large language models, including the image stuff. And that actually, LLMs at this point, it's a very 2023 sort of term. And I think this is important because when we get to the intersection of AI and robotics and so forth, or AI and target, we're talking about something a bit beyond large language model, but we might still be talking about generative AI. Where do you see this going? And what are the weapon systems that aren't currently, you said currently no one is actually talking about true autonomous weapons, but if that were the case, then there wouldn't be a controversy.

35:35Tracy Alloway:So there's clearly something just beyond the horizon that could come into the picture of a true autonomous weapon system where the technology is building towards that. If this weren't the case, there would be no dispute. You wouldn't have two books written about this subject. So what are these weapon systems that would classify as autonomous weapons that the technology is building towards right now? Yeah, I mean, I certainly think the trends are taking us there. And one of the things that you see in the Pentagon's position in this dispute, for example, is they want to preserve that option. Yeah.

36:06They're certainly not interested in tying their hands. I think you could see that evolving in a couple ways. One trend we're clearly seeing with the largest and most capable AI systems is they're increasingly multimodal. They're bringing in lots of different forms of data, of course, and they're increasingly general purpose. They can just like do a variety of different kinds of things. They become more capable of that. And so that's like one way in which you could see AI being used in ways that might sort of slowly pull humans out of the loop where instead of a person giving an AI really narrow tasks to do in a planning process, maybe the AI is able to take on more, bring in more data, take on more sophisticated, longer-term tasks.

36:49And we're certainly seeing this in other areas like coding where the task length that an AI system could do is growing exponentially over time. Another way that we might see this look is just we see a network of AI agents that are interacting with different pieces of data, doing different types of things, and that the net effect of that is that maybe humans are, again, sort of like nominally looking at these targets, but not actually approving them in some meaningful way. And then there's like a more separate, I would almost think of like an embodied form of AI and robotics, which could be a drone or munition or robotic system that has some kind of onboard autonomy that might be partly a distilled model so that it can be operating at the edge on lower computing on this actual munition or drone, or it might be some hybrid system that has partly machine learning, but also just a lot of hand-coded code that's more of an expert-level system that's going out into the battle space and hunting targets directly and attacking them.

37:52So something kind of like the low-cost drones that we're seeing Iran launch, but ones that can loiter and identify targets that attack them. And that doesn't exist today.

38:01Tracy Alloway:We don't have drones that loiter, that are just hanging out there. And then when something flat, then there's a system is like, this looks like a target attacks. That actually doesn't exist currently, as far as you know? Well, I mean, they're not in widespread use. So there have been some narrow examples, I would say historically, dating back to the 80s, in fact, of loitering munitions that could search over wider and would queue off of radars. And so radars are what the military would call a cooperative target that when they're emitting in the electromagnetic spectrum, if you know the signature of the radar you're looking for, you could see it.

38:38You could just home in on that radar. Now, if they turn off, it's different than Kitten and they're harder to find. But there have been some examples, a system that the US Navy had in the 80s called the Tomahawk anti-ship missile, not actually the same Tomahawk cruise missile that the military is using now, a different one that was designed to fly a search pattern and hunt Soviet ships. There was an Israeli system called the Harpy drone that was designed to go after radars that would loiter for a period of time. But these loitering munitions have never really been in widespread use by militaries.

39:09We got to invent one of those like high pitched alarms to deter the loitering drones from hanging out outside targets. I guess, I mean, we have electrical jamming. So that does exist. Okay. So when I think about as we move towards more autonomous weaponry, I think about bots basically interacting with bots at that point. And then I think back to previous examples of bots interacting with bots and there are numerous ones where things tend to go off the rails they just start debating the meaning of life right or they start talking in like a language that no one understands except them stuff like that does the possibility of undesired escalation go up the more we move towards fully autonomous weaponry i think that is a very serious risk and so the like mental model that I have for this are things like flash crashes that we've seen in financial markets due to the interactions of different algorithms that are executing trades, where you get these emergent properties of how the algorithms might interact in the market.

40:12And it's a competitive environment. Companies aren't going to share the details of what their algorithms are doing. And you get these strange behaviors. Now, the way that financial markets have dealt with this problem is regulators have installed circuit breakers to take stocks offline if the price moves too quickly, there's no referee to call timeout in war. And so I think that's like, particularly in cyberspace, one can envision a future where that is a risk, where things are happening at machine speed and you have autonomous offensive cyber operations. You need to defend against that. You need some measure of autonomy on the defensive side to defend at machine speed.

40:47And you could get situations where you get weird interactions that might escalate a conflict. Or it could also happen between drones interacting in some kind of crisis situation. Now, a situation where there's a big shooting war underway, people are already attacking, that might be less of a concern, although you still could worry about escalation geographically against bringing new countries into a conflict or maybe attacking really sensitive sites that are tied to nuclear command and control that you'd rather not go after. So I think that's a very real risk when we think about how this technology might be employed going forward.

41:20Tracy Alloway:What about AI in really difficult ethical questions, strikes where we know that civilians, for example, are going to be killed, which that happens all the time in war and presumably tries to be minimized. But war planners will find some level of acceptable, they call it collateral damage. Is AI playing a role or do you expect it to play a role in some of these strikes that may be gray areas? I think you could envision ways that AI would be used that would make warfare more precise and more humane and ethical and ways that it could be used that would not and would be the opposite. So, for example, if you had an AI system that could look over all this targeting data and then identify if a strike is within a certain distance using, you know, mutations of a certain size of protected targets, whether it's schools or hospitals or critical civilian infrastructure and say, hey, whoa, like warning here, you should not carry out the strike or it needs a higher level of approval, or maybe you should use smaller, more precise munitions.

42:31That would be a really beneficial use of AI, particularly when you're talking about a military campaign that hits a lot of targets in a short period of time. That could be really valuable and may reduce civilian casualties. You know, a risk of all of this is you can end up in a world where humans are just less engaged in this process, right? And so there's both mistakes that humans miss or humans just don't feel as morally responsible, which I think is like a really tricky thing to think about morally because on the one hand, as a democratic society, we make a decision as a nation to go to war.

43:07It's a very small number of people that have to carry that burden. And if someone, if you could say, well, look, what's the benefit to someone having like PTSD years after a conflict that they're haunted by something that happened. That doesn't seem great. Maybe we could reduce that. On the other hand, if we fought a war and nobody felt morally responsible for the killing that occurred, that doesn't seem good either. And that could lead to more suffering and civilian casualties in war. So I think that's certainly a concern when we think about how to use the technology. Yeah, this is very Ender's Game coded, right?

43:38Where you have someone who's basically playing like a video game and wiping out entire civilizations and They think it's just a video game, just an exercise, but it turns out it's actual warfare. And we're seeing some degree of that in the way that the Department of War is portraying this conflict so far. It's very video game-esque. Yeah, especially in the public presentation.

43:58Tracy Alloway:Yeah. Literal animated GIFs of video games. Exactly. So, Paul, you mentioned something. You mentioned the word circuit breaker. And circuit breakers are nice things to have in markets. I think they'd be even nicer things to have in armed conflict and war. Is there any possibility that you could design something like that for a major conflict? I think it's possible like at a technical level to figure out how you would do that and where you put protections on your side in the military and what you would do with even maybe cooperatively with an enemy. The challenge is how do you avoid what we were talking about earlier, a race to the bottom on safety?

44:35Yeah. And we're seeing this in the private sector between the companies as they're rushing to get products out to market. I think it's especially hard in the military space where countries are investing in the military because they're worried about what some other adversary might do and they want to get a leg up on them. And so it's not that cooperation in the midst of conflict never happens. It does. And countries have agreed to take certain weapons off the table, chemical and biological weapons, for example. It doesn't mean that they're never used, but most civilized countries said we're not going to use them.

45:11But those examples are pretty rare and it's pretty hard to do. And so I think that dynamic is the really challenging one. It's like, how do you find ways to cooperate with your enemies to avoid some of the biggest dangers here?

45:24Tracy Alloway:So I think there's a last question for me. You know, you mentioned that drones are a kind of robot and there are other robots that have been existence in either national security or police work for a while. I think there are robots on the subway sometimes that seem to be. Really? Yeah, but I don't think they really do. I've seen the robots at the grocery store and they end up like chasing me while I'm trying to buy carrots or something. Yeah, the ones that sweep the floors and stuff. Yeah, and there's the robots. Yeah, I think there is a, Eric Adams did a contract with some company that was doing like subway robots or something like that.

45:57Tracy Alloway:But these are really different. AI, as we talk about it, and robots are two different technological trees, but they are going to merge and there's the possibility of their ultimate merger. Do you foresee a world in which essentially we don't have human soldiers and wars are fought with who has the most advanced autonomous robots? We know China is investing a lot in humanoid robotics. Do you foresee a world in which that is the nature of a ground invasion as it happens with robots or various other sorts? Talk to us about how far that could go. Yeah. So, I mean, look, I think will we see robots use more and warfare?

46:37Absolutely. The long arc of technology in war from the first time someone picked up a rocket, threw it at somebody else has been towards greater distance between adversaries moving up through bows and arrows and rifles and intercontinental ballistic missiles. And I think robotics will be the next evolution of this trend of finding ways to find the enemy, strike the enemy without putting yourself at risk. And there's certainly a role for robotics out on the battlefield. I think a vision of like future wars of just robots fighting robots, there's no humans involved, is not realistic for a couple of reasons.

47:13One is I think militaries are going to need people relatively forward deployed to execute command and control for robotic systems. The U.S. military right now can fly drones remotely from the United States in a relatively uncontested environment against more sophisticated adversaries who could jam your communications link. And we see, for example, like a lot of jamming on the front lines in Ukraine. That's one of the ways you should go after these drones. Then you need people close by because it is easier to have shorter range protected communications. When you go to longer distances, that's just harder to do.

47:48So I think you need people relatively close for that reason. I think if you want to control territory, you have to put people there eventually to get out of a vehicle and walk around and control it. But I think the other reason is maybe a little dark, which I think realistically, in order for wars to end, there will have to be some human price that's paid. I think that's an unfortunate reality, that if it's just machines that are being destroyed, that we may not get to the place where one side or the other is willing to sue for peace. And I think, unfortunately, war is likely to involve people and human costs for a very long time.

48:25I have one more question as well, and I guess it's a thought experiment. But if we think back to sort of pivotal moments in military history and their intersection with technology, one of them that comes up is the Russian officer who decided not to press the button in response to the U.S. and thereby, you know, supposedly save the world from nuclear disaster. Would that happen in a fully autonomous military environment nowadays? I mean, today it would still happen because there's people involved. So this incident, Stanislav Petrov is sitting at a terminal and gets this warning that there's a ballistic missile launched from the United States against the Soviet Union.

49:05And then another missile, another, there's like five missiles coming in. And the thing that's interesting about this is when Petrov talked about it afterwards, and we could hear what he said because we all lived because he made the right decision here, is he talked about how he said he had a funny feeling in his gut. And that he knew that the Russian system, the Russians had just deployed, or the Soviets rather, just deployed a new satellite-based early warning system to detect US ICBM launches, that it was new. And he knew that a lot of the Soviet technology just didn't work that great at first.

49:36So he was skeptical of it. It turns out it was, in fact, faulty. It was detecting the reflection of sunlight off the top of clouds, and the system was identifying that as a missile launch. And that's what it was reporting. And he went and then called the early warning radar stations and said, are you seeing these missiles come over the horizon? He said, no, there's no missiles. So he reported up to the chain that the system was malfunctioning. I think the scary question here is, like, if that was an AI, what would the AI have done? Yeah. And it was kind of like whatever it was programmed to do, whatever it was trained to do.

50:07And obviously, we're seeing more general purpose AI systems like large language models have the ability to bring together more information to understand better context, to have just like a more contextual understanding of the questions that you're asking of it. But it still doesn't know the stakes of a conflict. It still doesn't know like in some visceral level what the consequences are. And so I think that's a strong, compelling reason why we need to have humans involved in these decisions. Even as the AI becomes more capable, there are still going to be things we want humans to do because humans understand why it matters.

50:42Tracy Alloway:I started the conversation by mentioning that it's not very controversial to say, have an anti-missile system fire a missile when there's one coming in. But that could be wrong. And you want to make sure that it is, in fact, a missile and not a civilian air jet or something like that. So even there, where it seems like a canonical example, if you just want to have the missile system go off, you would want to have human safeguards and human oversight and human understanding of the system such that it is, in fact, shooting down a missile. Anyway, Paul Shari, fascinating conversation. Really appreciate you coming out on the Oplots and talking about your work.

51:23Thank you. Really enjoyed the discussion. Thanks so much, Paul. That was depressing and fascinating all at the same time.

51:30Tracy Alloway:No, it was great. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

51:46Tracy Alloway:I kind of get choked up at the end thinking about that decision that saved humanity at the end. And it's actually... It's a crazy story. It's a crazy story. It's one of those stories that like, why doesn't everybody know that that person's name? I mean, when you think about how many people I couldn't remember it either. But shout out to another podcast. If you want to learn more about this, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History has at least one, possibly two episodes on narrow aversions of nuclear disaster. So very good to listen to, if not terrifying. You know, there's another point in that exact story that I think is really interesting.

52:22Tracy Alloway:And And it's something I've been thinking about a lot across AI because there's something similar about humans and AI, which is that there is definitely a gap between what we know and what we can articulate. And this is certainly true with AI, right? So the bot makes some decision or it determines something. It does not mean it's going to be able to spit out in words how it arrived at that decision. But that's true for humans as well. And so the idea that, like, OK, maybe we do get funny feelings about things. Or take, you know, like, again, we're still pretty good at determining the difference between AI generated text and human generated text.

53:01Can we often, but often, I mean, we still like often can get it right.

53:05Tracy Alloway:But could we write down exactly what we saw that we understood? There is that gap. And when we're talking about life or death decisions being made, it is scary to think about that role of instinct that we can't articulate having been taken out of the decision loop. Well, I think also technology is very good at pattern recognition and responding to patterns and preset paths. It's been programmed to do certain things. And I think in a war environment, that's one of the most uncertain environments that you can possibly imagine. And so you have to think that there should be some element of flexibility in your response.

53:44But I don't know how you actually encode that into a thing that like runs on rigid numbers and lines, lines of code. The other thing I was thinking was the anthropic situation and just how new that is from a sort of military history perspective in the sense that here we have this really important pivotal piece of technology that hasn't come out of like actual military demand. Right. To Paul's point, it's a commercial product. Its commercial uses are arguably a lot more profitable than its military ones. And so seeing that now interact with the Pentagon and the Department of War, really interesting.

54:21It's been flipped, right?

54:23Tracy Alloway:Yeah. The closest example, actually, that comes to mind, there is one example that's in fairly recent history, and that's Starlink. Oh, yeah, of course. And, of course, that was developed for commercial Internet purposes, but it played a role in Ukraine and so forth. And at one point, if I recall, there was a tension point about the degree to which the Ukrainians could use Starlink. And so I do think that is sort of an interesting parallel here. The other thing, and we didn't get to this, and this is going to be a little cynical, but I think it's right, which is that there is another element, I believe, to the Anthropic situation, which is like Anthropic is the last big lib tech company or perceived as such, right?

55:05Tracy Alloway:And we know that there's been this fairly sort of rightward turn in Silicon Valley over the years. And I don't think like Anthropic is like totally part of that. I think they're still sort of lib coded. I also think it's incidentally why a bunch of people who probably work in media end up using Claudia, even though they're all kind of the same. I do think there's something there in that they have this thing. They say, we're not going to ever have ads. And we know that Andreessen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen, just talked about ads are good. Ads democratize the internet. Ads enable the internet to be spread to everyone.

55:39Tracy Alloway:There are some other politics at play. Because, again, like from my understanding, and it would take a lawyer, it's like, I don't think that the agreement that OpenAI signed was that different than what the agreement that Anthropic had. There's probably a little bit of difference. I just think there's some other politics at play here. Perceptions matter. But to Paul's point, maybe nobody is talking about currently autonomous weapons right now, fully autonomous. But it can't be long. and I think this is going to be a real tension sooner rather than later. Can I say one thing? And I'm going to be slightly facetious, but also not.

56:16Can you be slightly facetious? Yeah, yeah. I'm going to be facetious, which is I have a solution to modern warfare.

56:21Tracy Alloway:Don't do it. Okay, but for real. No, for real. Yeah. If we're just going to have bots fighting bots and it's going to cost a lot of money and result in people's deaths, every country should have to build its biggest, best, most technologically advanced robot and just have them fight it out gladiatorial style. And my twist is, to Paul's point about war always having to be painful in some way, everyone in that particular society has to be engaged and dedicate some amount of time or money to building that particular robot. And you just have to iterate on the robot forever until you feel comfortable to have them fight.

57:01And that way everyone shares the pain, but without the loss of human life. Am I high? I don't think so.

57:07Tracy Alloway:Well, I think you should write a book. No, I don't think so. I think you should write a sci-fi book. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Paul Shari. He's at Paul underscore Shari. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashpot, and Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes.

57:36Tracy Alloway:And you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash authors. And if you enjoy All Thoughts, if you like it when we talk about the future of autonomous weapons, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

58:08Thank you.

58:34the value of long-term thinking. You plan, you diversify, you prepare for volatility. But in life, even the best strategies can't prevent every bad day. A fire, a loss, a disruption that demands immediate attention. When that happens, what matters isn't just what you planned, it's who shows up. That's where Cincinnati Insurance comes in. For more than 75 years, they've helped individuals and businesses navigate life's toughest moments with care, expertise, and personal attention. Together with independent agents, Cincinnati Insurance focuses on relationships, not transactions. Their approach is grounded in experience, follow through, and trust built over time.

59:15Bad days happen, and when they do, you deserve an insurance partner who understands risk, respects what you've built, and is ready to help you move forward. The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. Let them make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at c-i-n-f-i-n dot com.

59:33Tracy Alloway:Sonesta Travel Pass makes traveling more rewarding, designed to help you get more out of every stay. Sign up at Sonesta.com to enjoy instant savings, bonus points, and valuable perks like early check-in, late checkout, room upgrades, and free stays over time. With Sonesta Travel Pass, every stay brings you closer to your next reward. Choose from more than 1 ,100 hotels across 13 distinctive brands and unlock the best available rates when you book direct with Sonesta Travel Pass. Here today, roam tomorrow. Join now at Sonesta.com. Terms and conditions apply.

1:00:32to U.S. customers excluding New York and Maine through Payward Interactive Incorporated. View legal disclosures at kraken.com slash legal slash disclosures. Terms and conditions apply.