"Unless there has been some huge technological leap of which I am unaware"
No. As I said in the first sentence of the TL;DR, "Ukraine will soon be the testing-ground for... robotic patrol & surveillance." Testing-ground. I did NOT claim "fully autonomous weapons" - I mentioned Chinese surveillance AI, which is already in use to monitor Chinese cities and citizens.
I then said that this "is simultaneously his dry-run data-collection of robotic systems, before *exporting* the kit to dictators." Dry-run data-collection is NOT 'fully autonomous weapons'.
In the next paragraph, I said "when we transition to robotic warfare..." It was in that sense that I discussed future automation of production.
It's also worth remembering that "At one Fanuc plant in Oshino, Japan, the use of automated manufacturing to produce the next generation of industrial robots has allowed the company to reduce its human staff to only four individuals per shift" [here: https://www.hennessyfunds.com/insights/sector-highlight-japan-factory-automation#:~:text=At%20one%20Fanuc%20plant%20in,only%20four%20individuals%20per%20shift. ]
And, AI is composing music, piloting jet fighters in simulation, and Putin has robotic tanks [here: https://www.aiva.ai/ and here: https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/military-ai-vanquishes-human-fighter-pilot-f-16-simulation-how-ncna1238773 and here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9457091/Vladimir-Putin-shows-fearsome-robot-tanks.html ]
The key strategic point is this:
Patrolling a captured territory is the most fraught and expensive, demoralizing component of an invasion. Surveillance AI on robotic platforms frees the humans to do what humans do best; I am at no time discussing an "autonomous army" or "fully autonomous weapons". I also only said "trucked about by autonomous mining vehicles" - I said nothing of automated excavators, though those are already in development with demo videos on Youtube. You repeatedly attempted to dismiss what I was saying by 'converting' my statements into "fully autonomous AI weapons from fully autonomous factories with fully autonomous mining" - that's an inane exaggeration. Read carefully.
