> I think its gross to distill military violence as defending 'assets [others] might want to annex'.

Yes, but that's how the world works:

Another country wants a bit of your country for some reason, they can take it by force unless you can make at the very least a credible threat against them, sometimes a lot more than that.

Note that this does not exclude that there has to be an aggressor somewhere. I'm not excluding the existence of aggressors, nor the capacity for the USA to be an aggressor. All I'm saying is your quotation is so vague as to also encompass those who are not.

> What US assets were being annexed when US AI was used to target Gazans?

First, I'm saying the statement is so broad as to encompass other things besides being a warmonger. Consider the opposite statement: "don't support our warfighters and don't maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries" would be absolutely insane, therefore "support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries" says nothing.

Second, in this case the country doing the targeting is… Israel. To the extent that the USA cares at all, it's to get votes from the large number of Jewish people living in the USA. Similar deal with how it treats Cuba since the fall of the USSR: it's about votes (from Cuban exiles in that case, but still, votes).

Much as I agree that the conduct of Israel with regard to Gaza was disproportionate, exceeded the necessity, and likely was so bad as to even damage Israel's long-term strategic security, if you were to correctly imagine the people of Israel deciding "don't support our warfighters and don't maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries", they would quickly get victimised much harder than those they were victimising. That's the point there: the quote you cite as evidence, is so broad that everyone has approximately that, because not having it means facing ones' own destruction.

There's a mis-attributed quote, "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf", that's where this is at.

> These two thoughts seem at conflict.

Musk is openly and directly saying "Canada is not a real country.", says "cis" is hate speech, response to pandemic was tweeting "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.", and self-justification for his trillion dollar bonus for hitting future targets is wanting to be in control of what he describes as a "robot army"; Trump openly and explicitly wants the USA to annex Canada, Greenland, Panama canal, is throwing around the national guard, openly calls critics traitors and calls for death penalty. They're a subtle as exploding volcanoes, nobody needs to take the worst case interpretations of what they're saying to notice this.

Saying "support our warfighters" is something done by basically every nation everywhere all the time, because those places that don't do this quickly get taken over by nearby nations who sense weakness. Which is kinda how the USA got Texas, because again, I'm not saying the USA is harmless, I'm saying the quote doesn't show that.

> What 'assets' were being protected from annexation here by this oppressive use of the tool? The chips?

This would have been a much better example to lead with than the military stuff.

I'm absolutely all on board with the general consensus that the US police are bastards in this specific way, have been since that kid got shot for having a toy gun in an open-carry state. (I am originally from a country where even the police are not routinely armed, I do not value the 2nd amendment, but if you're going to say "we allow open carry of firearms" you absolutely do not get to use "we saw someone carrying a firearm" as an excuse to shoot them).

However: using LLMs to code doesn't seem to be likely to make a difference either way for this. If I was writing a gun-detection AI, perhaps I'm out of date, but I'd use a simpler model that runs locally on-device and doesn't do anything else besides the sales pitch.

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