Checking in on WWCF

Two updates are in order.

Listening to a recent podcast, it occurred to me that my very occasional series started long ago, Which Will Come First (WWCF), is in need of an update for one post. That led me to find another that is very close but not yet able to be resolved.

First, Ross Douthat interviewed Christian Brose on his podcast Interesting Times. Brose is the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, a defense company building autonomous weapons for the U.S. military.

It was fittingly a very interesting interview. Brose lays out the case for how the U.S. military is ill suited for the current and future landscape of warfare. The discussion of autonomous drones and other technologies including where tactics and strategy might be headed reminded me of my prior prediction regarding future war.

Specifically, it was this WWCF post from May 2022 on intentional detonation of a nuclear weapon as an act of war versus a battle of robots against robots as the dominant form of combat.

In that piece I predicted with 75% confidence that robot vs. robot would come first. While I cannot declare any resolution on this yet, it seems clear that technology continues to progress along this path fairly rapidly. The interview with Brose reinforced my thoughts for sure.

While the risk of nuclear detonation is still likely in the same stochastic realm as I described in the post, if anything the mean risk is probably slightly lower today than it was in 2022.

Searching for that post led me to another WWCF that is getting close to being resolved. That was this one from May 2021 on whether the NFL would start using sensors in footballs, which already are in the balls it turns out, to actually determine calls on the field or if the MLB would employ an autonomous system to determine calls on the field thinking but not limiting this to calling balls and strikes.

While the new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) Challenge System is in use by the MLB (a big improvement to the game in my opinion), it is not yet making the initial call. It is only used to resolve a challenge to a human ump’s call.

Without assigning any confidence to it, I predicted the MLB side of this one will win out. I’ll now put that at 90% confidence.

P.S. Getting back to making WWCF posts is on my goal list.