The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Automation of War Drags On || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

As we look out onto the battlefields of the wars of tomorrow, will we see humanoid robots and AI-driven autonomous weapons...Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-automation-of-war-drags-on

Hey, all Peter Zion here coming to you from Colorado today. We are taking an entry from the Patreon Ask Peter a Question page specifically. Yes, demographics are in decline. Yes, that is going to change a whole lot of things. But when it comes to military issues, won't artificial intelligence and automation, above all, humanoid robots and and asteroids be able to take the place of humans in the not too distant future? It's like, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Okay, so let's assume for the moment that the supply chain for high-end semiconductors does not break down,

and that is a very poor bet. Put up to the side. We are nowhere close. There's two issues here. One is something that AI is reasonably good at, and that is processing. Take huge amounts of data and processing and distilling it down. That's basically what ChatchipT has been doing for a while

and is getting incrementally better at. That is not the same as thinking. Thinking requires significantly more processing power than you can put not in just in one chip, but into a whole server blade of chips or a whole server stack of chips. You basically need an ongoing connection to a server farm with all that processing and computing power in order to do something that approximates

thought. So taking data and distilling it or processing it? Sure. Thinking, reacting to your real life environment. That's a whole different issue. And it is shaped by the data that you can feed in, which is not an AI issue or a chip issue. It's a sensor issue. And our sensors are not nearly as good as anything else in the processing department. That's problem one. Problem two is much more direct. Let's assume that your sensors are perfect. Let's assume that we do have AI chips that are in order of magnitude more advanced that we have right now. Let's assume that maybe you can have a data link back to a data farm without any sort of jamming. And by the way, good luck with that. Movement, people, movement. You have to be able to have a device, an Android, a robotic tank, whatever

it happens to be, that can loiter, that can operate at range without a whole lot of decision-making that is done by humans. And the problem there is power and acuity. Right now, lithium is the best battery system we have. And it can maintain a charge for a few hours of action for, say, an electric vehicle, which is nothing compared to what you're going to need when you're talking about tracked vehicles or articulated joints. The second issue is stability. Not only do you have to have good sensors to be able to perceive the environment, you have to be able to manipulate that environment. Now, I'm sure a lot of you have seen that viral footage from about a year ago of a humanoid robot basically doing a back flip up and landing on the table behind him. It was like,

ooh, ah, we're about to be replaced. You know, how many attempts that took? 11,400. You know how many more attempts it took before it could do it again? Another 13,000. These things can't learn. They can take actions. There are roles for them. A pack mule. Might not sound sexy? Kind of a big deal on things like this. desert warfare. Autonomous weapon systems, though, are simply not anywhere close. And then I have to go back to that thing that I said we were going to ignore, and that's whether or not the chips are going to get better. The highest end chips we have right now are rapidly approaching one nanometer, but they require 30,000 pieces and 100,000 manufacturing supply chain steps and 9,000 companies,

and over half of these things are single-point failures. It doesn't take a significant shift in the international environment to make a few of them fall out of the constellation. and when that happens, no more chips will be made. Not to mention that the chips, as they are existing right now, are designed for measures that we already have, things we already need, things we already use, which means that they're not shock tested. They can't handle vibration.

They can't handle temperature variation. They certainly can't handle things like dust. We would have to first design a fundamentally new chip that is far more advanced than anything we have already that incorporates this sort of hardening into it. We haven't even started that design. process and assuming that everyone got it all right on their first try, you would see your first volume run of those chips come online probably around 2033. So, no, not something I worry about.