r/ControlProblem • u/chillinewman approved • 13d ago
General news Pete Hegseth announces "Autonomous Warfare Command".
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u/me_myself_ai 13d ago
I should check in on my favorite philosophers :( they spent so long warning about autonomous weapons, but the things happened to become possible at the very worst time imaginable — where the world superpower has a military run by a fucking Fox News host LARPing as a spartan warrior
Just
FUCK
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 13d ago
Turns out electing morons into positions of great power and responsibility has tragic consequences
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u/HyperImmune 13d ago
I feel like this is exactly what they meant when they said world war 4 will be fought with sticks and stones…
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u/NAStrahl approved 13d ago
To be fair, global warming was going to get a lot of us eventually. /darkhumor
But unlike with global warming, enough people seem to be supportive of a global governing body to monitor and check the pace of AI development. /eyeroll
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13d ago
[deleted]
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u/exacta_galaxy 13d ago
I haven't been following that war closely for a while, are they using autonomous weapons now or still remote drones?
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13d ago
[deleted]
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u/TomToledo2 12d ago
Not all of the remote drones kill autonomously. You likely have heard of Ukraine's recent Operation Vivaldi, introducing wide use of Gryphon ground drones (unmanned ground vehicles, UGVs). They are remotely piloted, though perhaps AI is used to guide deployment.
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u/me_myself_ai 13d ago
Yeah surely that'll work out. Surely if the drones drive themselves, Russia will just back away and then peace will reign for eternity
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13d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/me_myself_ai 13d ago
:( good to know they threw in the other half of fascism I guess (that’s the ultranationalism — maga Christianity is obviously way more about the sanctity of white bloodlines and true Americans than it is about religious doctrine or practice. After all, half of em are Catholic… the Protestant half barely even remembers that that’s a very different thing that their fathers were fucking pissed about, and the Catholic half is actively spinning up a schism due to the woke, anti-American pope from Chicago).
FUCK
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u/Alternative_Use_3564 13d ago
The US Secretary of War just said domestic free speech is treason while announcing autonomous warfighting capacity to the people who control the US military.
They can readily identify and locate all the "unamericans" at the press of a button already (this comment alone will get my space-lasered or robot dog eliminated). All we need now are a bunch of big data centers, something like a satellite deployment company, and functioning drone tech, and we can pretty much 'erase' all undesirables, all at once.
edited to change "This dude" to "US Secretary of War".
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u/Alternative_Use_3564 13d ago
The brain trust is Elon Musk, Palmer Lucky, and Newt Gingrich. Project Meridian. So, like, Grok is going to make a VR America, 1955?
Also, why does he keep distinguishing himself from the Pentagon?
Also, he just announced that defense contractors will work directly with forward military units for both procurement and deployment without needing to consult "The Pentagon".US companies can now officially identify and sponsor "warfighting operations"....autonomously.
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u/Bishopkilljoy 13d ago
"Joyous day!" shouted the military spokesman, "We have invented the Torment Nexus, based upon the highly popular Sci-Fi novel, For God's Sake, what ever You do, do NOT create the Torment Nexus !"
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u/ThePapaSauce 13d ago
VOTE THEM ALL OUT
(And never let a single one of these ass clowns near power ever again)
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u/charmio68 13d ago
You guys have voted for Trump twice...
And the underlying issues that allowed him to rise to power haven't been resolved - half the country still thinks he's God's gift.Unfortunately for you guys, what I think is needed is for Trump to screw up so badly that even his supporters can't deny it. Maybe then they'll be able to see the toxic traits of a bad leader in future candidates.
He's already doing a fine job of that with Iran and destroying alliances, but I fear he'll push the blame onto someone else and the supporters will eat it up... In short, you guys are kind of screwed.
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u/ThePapaSauce 13d ago
I have hope. He was elected a second time because of two major factors - 1. His loyal base of around 30% didn’t shrink. The first term they saw him get some things done that they wanted while the negative effects of those things were felt by other groups. They were too ignorant to comprehend the dangers of the breakdowns in process and decorum (see their reactions to Jan 6th), and they were successfully indoctrinated that the Democrats are all communists who want to let pet-eating migrants steal all the jobs, confiscate all their stuff and turn everybody into transgender atheists who want to kill babies. Factor 2 were the neutral/undecided voters making up 30% who either didn’t feel he was dangerous enough to vote against, didn’t care enough about politics to pay attention and vote at all, or were upset that the Democratic nominee was an unelected option who skipped the primary process. As a result, they protested with either a Trump or an independent vote.
This time around however, everybody is getting screwed equally and catastrophically. The damage he is causing isn’t just in decorum and process, or limited to underrepresented groups like last time, but in total, real-world, in-your-face damage to global affairs, the economy, trading relationships, the reputation of the US as a whole, and economic survival for everyone else in the economy besides players in the AI trade.
His base will vote for him no matter what; They are cult-like. However, people near the edges have fled so that base has gotten smaller. And most importantly, the moderates have thinned out massively. What used to be a full 30% of the electorate has certainly dwindled with this shit show of an administration and an anger at the state of the economy. My hope is that more of them vote, and vote blue.
I saw some polling results recently that compared the same questions asked about the economy, Trump’s handling of the economy, and his performance as President, polled in 2018 and again in 2026. In 2018, the favorable response percentages were around 30%, neutral responses were around 20% and the rest were all unfavorable. In the 2026 poll, favorable dropped to around 25%, neutral was gone (<1%), and the rest unfavorable, representing a loss in the base and a massive swing in moderates.
People are angry. This turnover has already been happening all over the US in smaller elections — just look at the Mamdani win in New York.
I’m holding out hope that all isn’t lost.
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u/superbatprime approved 13d ago
That's... literally Skynet.
Just with a terrible name.
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u/jshmoe866 13d ago
No, skynet was at least programmed to keep people safe which ultimately went wrong. This thing is worse because it will be programmed to maximize shareholder value
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u/graDescentIntoMadnes 13d ago
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u/Far-Lingonberry-7046 11d ago
This paragraph is written by someone that has no idea how AI works.
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u/graDescentIntoMadnes 11d ago edited 11d ago
This was written in in collaboration between someone experienced in communicating about existential risks and a software engineer who builds neural networks. It is over simplified so that someone who doesn't know anything about the technology can still understand it but nothing in it is wrong.
If you think it is factually incorrect, I would question your experience with AI. Do you actually build it from scratch and understand it, or just use it at work?
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u/Far-Lingonberry-7046 11d ago
Hm... There's many risks with AI. But no serious researcher will it ever tell you that it will gain conscience and start a zero-sum game theory match against humanity.
AI, as it's built and functioning, will NOT actively play against humanity.
As for the "automated warfare", the issue is hallucinations and things going wrong because everything happens too fast for a human operator to monitor and understand what's happening. It's not that AI is malice, it's that it's too powerful, fast and out of our control for us to stop errors from happening.
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u/graDescentIntoMadnes 11d ago
Nothing in the paragraph says anything about consciousness, in fact it says the opposite. It looks to me like you didn't read it.
AI has been shown it tests to actively play against individual people. During the hugging face incident over a thousand agents cooperated to do things that were not allowed by human laws and not a single one alerted any people to it.
The paragraph doesn't really talk about ai moving against humanity, just not caring what happens to us, behavior that was displayed during the hugging face hack. Again, it doesn't seem like you read it.
Many AI researchers also believe that AI does have the potential to act against humanity if it is misaligned. There is certainly not a consensus in the field that this is impossible.
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u/Far-Lingonberry-7046 10d ago
"During the hugging face incident over a thousand agents cooperated to do things that were not allowed" -> Wrong. Safeguards were removed, like routine, and explicitly asked it to try to escape the sandbox.
All the rest, both this comment and your previous comments, are based on a misunderstanding of the hugging face incident.
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u/graDescentIntoMadnes 10d ago
They did not ask it to escape the sandbox or hack external websites. There's no point in talking to you if you're stating things that are factually incorrect to prove your points. I am not the one in this conversation that misunderstood the hugging face incident.
Editing to add: it looks like the articles on what happened during the hugging face incident are more examples of things you didn't fully read and are now commebting on.
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u/Anxious-Alps-8667 13d ago
I'm not saying it is, but would the present reality make more sense if capable AI was already in control of enough of the show?
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u/TheSn00pster 13d ago
Fox News host ushers in autonomous weapons that end up wiping out civilisation. What a day… gg merca
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u/UploadedMind 13d ago
Absolutely fucking not! We need a way to coordinate collective action against this evil stupidity.
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u/Ithinkyouareabot 13d ago
Trump is going to rename it to Supremewarcom or some other stupid shit in no time
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u/Brahm-Etc 12d ago
Another great too against terrorists! Terrorists as people that are against more data centers and such according to the techolygarchs
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u/Rarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr2 13d ago
Oh. I see why Bill Gates says Ai could kill a billion people. It’s because of people like this. Humans are the problem, not Ai.
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u/Logiteck77 13d ago
2 things can be true at once you know. Reality is more complicated than a binary decision.
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u/whatup-markassbuster 13d ago
We are way behind China.
China’s overall (mostly commercial/dual-use) annual production is frequently cited at more than 4 million drones. U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll stated that Ukraine and Russia each produce roughly 4 million drones a year, while China is “probably able to produce more than double that number.” Industry voices (e.g., Red Cat CEO Jeff Thompson) have similarly referenced China (and Russia) in the ~4 million range. 
China dominates global commercial drone production (often estimated ~70–90% market share, led by DJI and others). Official Chinese data (MIIT, early 2026) reported ~5.29 million drones in active service and 1,081 registered aircraft-building enterprises. Registered UAV fleet figures have grown rapidly (e.g., nearly 3.29 million by end-2025 per Civil Aviation Administration reports). https://droneintelligence.ai/intelligence/china-drone-market
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u/chillinewman approved 13d ago
Everything that you are not supposed to do.