Defense Department AI chief: Keeping humans in loop not always possible anymore

> The Defense Department is implementing a 2023 policy it interprets as allowing the replacement of human beings with human judgment.

Sounds like we'll be one hallucination away from Armageddon. Nice knowing you all.

There is no longer any hope of keeping humans in the loop or even "on the loop" at all times. The Russia-Ukraine war has woken everyone up to the value of drones which is going to cause everyone to dump lots of money and effort into electronic warfare, which just means 'jamming radio waves'. And once everyone realizes that that is happening, the obvious next and final step is to make the drones autonomous. Define geographic parameters and target types and tell it to go. It does way-finding using ground features and dead-reckoning so that it doesn't rely on GPS, it drops its bombs or fires its gun on boats, tanks, or people who are within the boundaries, and then returns home.

There is no hope of avoiding the technology. It's cheap to implement, expensive to counter, and even the civilian world has all of the necessary pieces already. We have no guarantee that it isn't already in use in Ukraine; they are definitely already running object recognition on drones in their war zones.

All of our existing countermeasures are way too expensive. The only way to counter any of it in a cost-effective way, that I have been able to think of, is more drones.

This amusingly scary pairs with

Escalation Risks from Language Models in Military and Diplomatic Decision-Making

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294383

If anyone else did it they'd be reporting it like it's the end of the world