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Russian support could give China's army "a decisive advantage in a potential conflict with the United States." (www.ft.com)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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also, this is an incredible statement, they're basically moaning that China would be able to respond effectively to a nuclear first strike by the burger empire

Asian defence officials said a joint early warning system would also allow China to launch nuclear weapons upon receiving warning of an impending nuclear strike. That would mark a shift from its strategy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation against a strike that has already occurred — a change that nuclear experts believe Beijing has long contemplated.

https://archive.ph/KgDfJ

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago (1 children)

FT answered my question:

They have also switched from using Russian as the language of co-ordination to real-time communication through interpreters on ships on both sides.

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves if/when a new military bloc develops/expands.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 6 months ago (1 children)

With the way machine learning is advancing, I wonder if real time translation built into equipment will be possible soon.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Interesting thought. Probably possible, I think the main question there would be reliability for sensitive matters as well as security. Reliability meaning, if the AI is even a little off, it could cause a miscommunication with terrible consequences, and the best AI is probably still far off from comparing to an expert human interpreter (the best I know of that's fast and public is DeepL - similar to GoogleTranslate but arguably somewhat better - and then there are LLMs (Large Language Models) who can sort of do translation, but it's more of a gimmick than something they are designed for). There may be better though that's specifically in the sphere of Russian and Chinese language translation (I have no familiarity with AI translation tools originating from there). And security meaning, you'd need to be able to process what's said locally in such a way that it's not being sent off somewhere where it can be intercepted. For it to be local processing, it would require more local compute, which is going to be more expensive; might not be noteworthy difference between local and cloud compute if it's something like DeepL, but if it's a design more like an LLM, those can be greedy on GPU power.

So overall, I could see it being used as an assistive tool along with human translators to speed up the translation of especially long communications (if long communications is a thing in that context), but I doubt it's going to be replacing them meaningfully without worsening the communication process.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

I agree with the risk that there could be mistranslation, so that has to be balanced with the need for speed of communication. If you're in battle conditions, waiting for the translator to hear the message and then translate could lose valuable time. I'd also argue this could be a narrower use case where the militaries could decide on a set of common phrases to be used in such situations, which would be a much easier problem to tackle. So, yeah there are definitely pros and cons, but if translation can be made reliable then I can see a lot of benefits at least in some contexts.