I gave up maybe 2/3rds of the way through.

I liked the premise and the initial worldbuilding, but the exploration of race and imperialism was blunt and simplistic--like it was pretending to be saying something interesting, but was really just using those injustices as a source of plot-necesssry hardship for the protagonist.

This alone didn't bother me too much. I was enjoying the book and probably would have finished it, but then the plot shifted towards action about halfway through. This was jarring, and never quite felt real. Similar to my criticism above, because it never felt as emotionally impactful as it seemed to think it was being, everything felt a little melodramatic and "PG-13 pretending too hard to be R" like I was reading a edgy YA novel (to be fair, I felt that way about her previous books).

And maybe I just stopped too early, but the themes around "translation" didn't seem to be going anywhere.

Overall, I like that she's changing things up and think she has a lot of promise as a writer, but this felt a bit amateurish, or maybe just rushed.

I mean no disrespect, but this simply doesn't reflect reality.

You begin by casually assuming penetration of Russian communications is so absolute we'd know of a launch order, based on our abilities to monitor battlefield communications and track the mass mobilization of the hundreds of thousands of troops?

Then you seem to misunderstand that "30 minutes" is the time until the missile hits Washington DC, not the time until the launch, and frankly it wouldn't make much difference even if that were the case.

Also, we somehow have the ability to hit all their launch sites before they even fire?

Also, we're tracking all Russian subs 24/7?

Then you compare all of this to cyber-sabotage of Iranian centrifuges. Which isn't at all related and also hasn't stopped Iran's nuclear program.

The US has amazing capabilities, but it's not magic. There is zero chance we would be able to prevent or even significantly mitigate a nuclear attack were it to occur.

If North Korea happens to launch a single missile our way, we might be able to stop it, but I wouldn't count on it. A country like Russia launching an attack would be the end of the world for everyone.

My point was not that it's the same, it was simply that cruise missiles and short/medium range ballistic missiles are routinely intercepted by the same or similar systems used to shoot down planes.

This is very different from what is required to deal with an ICBM.

I don't know offhand, and the actual tested time may even be classified, but for context the number typically given with for American missiles is under five minutes between the president issuing the order and the missile leaving the silo.

From there, it depends on whether the missile was land based or launched from a sub, but for land based missiles it'll be hitting it's target perhaps half an hour later, and significantly shorter if it's launched by a sub offshore.

I'm aware of the various missile defense systems we've developed. None have demonstrated a consistent ability to shoot down ICBMs.

We've had more luck with short and medium range defense, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

With ICBMs, you either have to shoot it down during boost, which means you more or less have to be on station waiting for the launch, or you have to shoot it down midcourse, when it's going 15,000mph a hundred miles above the planet.

They talk about terminal defense, but I'll believe that when I see it.

The closest thing we have to a real defense capability is the GMD, which claims a "50% success rate" against individually launched missiles, with advanced preparation and warning, and a couple more caveats besides. It's nothing close to a real world demonstration. At best it's a last ditch Hail-Mary strategy.

The simple fact is that it's really, really hard to shoot down something moving that fast. A bullet is standing still by comparison. And even if we could that doesn't solve for hypersonic cruise missiles, stealth bombers, or any of a half dozen other deployment strategies.

If we did develop truly reliable ballistic missile defense, it would probably be a bad thing, as our adversaries would presumably not be too far behind, and we'd enter a world in which nukes could be deployed through other means without the risk of being immediately blanketed by ICBMs in response.

There is really no comparison between a medium range cruise missile and a an ICBM, they're entirely different problems.

Shooting down a cruise missile is a lot like shooting down a plane. Intercepting an ICBM is like swatting a meteor from the sky.

...that really isn't how it is.

The engineering challenges are well known, the tests and success rate is documented as it's not possible to keep secret. I am American and my masters is in military development. We do not have a magical ballistic missile shield hiding up our sleeves.

Possible? Sure.

Likely? Absolutely not.

Reliably intercepting even existing ICBMs is a ridiculously difficult engineering challenge. The damn things are travelling at 4 or 5 miles/second through space, they can fragment into multiple independent reentry vehicles complete with decoys. Stopping even one is a challenge, even when we know in advance it will be launched. Stopping a full attack is crazy.

Added to this, if the technology somehow was developed to stop ICBMs, there are plenty of other delivery systems existing or in development..

It's likely that offense will have the advantage over defense for the foreseeable future, and even if that changes, the cost of a single bomb getting through is so high, no one will ever willingly to bet on their interception systems.

Again, this isn't really accurate.

It's not necessarily true that it'll be trained on indiscriminate data from the internet, and it's not necessarily true that it would simply adopt human behaviors as its own even if it were.

There's a great deal of concern.

But to address your implied argument, there's no reason to believe an AI will necessarily have any of the motivations that we associate with normal life, much less human beings.

intelligence =/= ego, or even survival instinct

There's no real reason to think it would be resentful, or capable of growing bored, or sadistic, or even care if it was turned off. Those are traits baked into living things by evolution.

That said 1) we can't really be sure that's true and 2) it might still easily cause unimaginable destruction incidentally

And so yes, while there's a lot of hype on this subreddit in particular, there's actually a great deal of concern about it more broadly.

That concern isn't having much impact right now because AI is making incredible advances possible, and it's really hard to regulate something both so poorly understood and profitable, and AGI is still firmly in the realm of science fiction as far as most of the population is concerned.

If you're going to speculate like that, you need to provide specific examples of suspect posts and users.

As others have said, it seems unlikely someone is paying to promote a book that's more than a year old. And if they were, I think we'd probably see more action than "biweekly posts."

If you can show that the users making these posts have strange behavior patterns indicating they're bots or paid promoters: Interesting.

Otherwise: meh.

It's passed along with the human dna, primarily in the egg, meaning it's inherited maternally (though I believe there are some exceptions to this).