How does the ever-increasing use of AI in the military for the direct purpose of murdering people affect your p(doom)?

... man, now that the post has been downvoted a bunch I feel bad for leaving such a snarky answer. It's a perfectly reasonable question, folks!

Overcompressed actual answer: core pieces of a standard doom-argument involve things like "killing all the humans will be very easy for a moderately-generally-smarter-than-human AI" and "killing all the humans (either as a subgoal or a side-effect of other things) is convergently instrumentally useful for the vast majority of terminal objectives". A standard doom counterargument usually doesn't dispute those two pieces (though there are of course exceptions); a standard doom counterargument usually argues that we'll have ample opportunity to iterate, and therefore it doesn't matter that the vast majority of terminal objectives instrumentally incentivize killing humans, we'll iterate until we find ways to avoid that sort of thing.

The standard core disagreement is then mostly about the extent to which we'll be able to iterate, or will in fact iterate in ways which actually help. In particular, cruxy subquestions tend to include:

• How visible will "bad behavior" be early on? Will there be "warning shots"? Will we have ways to detect unwanted internal structures?
• How sharply/suddenly will capabilities increase?
• Insofar as problems are visible, will labs and/or governments actually respond in useful ways?

Militarization isn't very centrally relevant to any of these; it's mostly relevant to things which are mostly not in doubt anyways, at least in the medium-to-long term.

I'd say one of the main reasons is because military-AI technology isn't being optimized towards things we're afraid of. We're concerned about generally intelligent entities capable of e. g. automated R&D and social manipulation and long-term scheming. Military-AI technology, last I checked, was mostly about teaching drones and missiles to fly straight and recognize camouflaged tanks and shoot designated targets while not shooting not designated targets.

And while this still may result in a generally capable superintelligence in the limit (since "which targets would my commanders want me to shoot?" can be phrased as a very open-ended problem), it's not a particularly efficient way to approach this limit at all. Militaries, so far, just aren't really pushing in the directions where doom lies, while the AGI labs are doing their best to beeline there.

The proliferation of drone armies that could be easily co-opted by a hostile superintelligence... It doesn't have no impact on p(doom), but it's approximately a rounding error. A hostile superintelligence doesn't need extant drone armies; it could build its own, and co-opt humans in the meantime.

I can only speak for myself, but I downvoted for leaning very heavily on a current political conflict, because it's notoriously difficult to reason about generalities due to the mindkilling effect of taking sides.  The fact that I seem to be on a different side than you (though there ain't no side that's fully in the right - the whole idea of ethnic and religious hatred is really intractable) is only secondary.

I regret engaging on that level.  I should have stuck with my main reaction that "individual human conflict is no more likely to lead to AI doom than nuclear doom".  It didn't change the overall probability IMO.

If military AI is dangerous, it's not because it's military. If a military robot can wield a gun, a civilian robot can certainly acquire one as well.

The military may create AI systems that are designed to be amoral, but it will not want systems that overinterpret orders or violate the chain of command. Here as everywhere, if intentional misuse is even possible at all, alignment is critical and unintentional takeoff remains the dominant risk.

In seminal AI safety work Terminator, the Skynet system successfully triggers a world war because it is a military AI in command of the US nuclear arsenal, and thus has the authority to launch ICBMs. This, ironically to how it is usually ridiculed, gets AI risks quite right but grievously misjudges the state of computer security. If Skynet was running on Amazon AWS instead of a military server cluster, it would only be marginally delayed from the same outcome.

The prompting is not the hard part of operating an AI. If you can talk an AI ship into going rogue, a civilian AI can talk it into going rogue. This situation is inherently brimming with doom- it is latently doomed in multiple ways- the military training and direct access to guns merely removes small roadbumps. All the risk materialized at once, when you created an AI that had the cognitive capability to conceive of and implement plans that used a military vessel for its own goals. Whether the AI was specifically trained on this task is, in this case, really not the primary source of danger.

"My AI ship has gone rogue and is shelling the US coastline."

"I hope you learnt a lesson here."

"Yes. I will not put the AI on the ship next time."

"You may be missing the problem here--"