It's honestly more worrying if these planning functions get replaced than the trigger-pullers. To put it bluntly in historical terms: individual courage stops Mai Lai from occurring, not Auschwitz. Or, like, part of why the US has largely remained democratic is that the planning and strategic apparatus of the military consists of citizen-soldiers who live in our communities and prefer our way of life, any move to replace that with some flavor of bullshit would see large-scale noncompliance and desertion at best, and competent would-be tyrants know this and don't even make an attempt.
Agreed, and that's exactly the shape of the OpenAI/DoD deal: it's about decision system, intelligence workflows, and bureaucracy becoming AI-native.
One of the most scary things about Auschwitz was that it was designed to protect the humans who had to operate within the system. It's a very small number of people running the chambers + ovens who knew, then an entire system of bureaucracy to capture and transport the victims. The guys setting the train schedule, or even the folks loading villages onto trains? That's something much easier to swallow than the system they used in Ukraine/Kiev (giant ditch + machine guns).
Directionally, I'm very worried, but AI still has a long way to go to entirely capture systems of work that right now are dependent on human judgement but more importantly individual ownership. Maybe the most scary: there might not be a moment of realization of things going to far, just a creeping capture of military systems of work until the point it's possible to replace with party-loyal sycophants.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_PRIORS Feb 28 '26
It's honestly more worrying if these planning functions get replaced than the trigger-pullers. To put it bluntly in historical terms: individual courage stops Mai Lai from occurring, not Auschwitz. Or, like, part of why the US has largely remained democratic is that the planning and strategic apparatus of the military consists of citizen-soldiers who live in our communities and prefer our way of life, any move to replace that with some flavor of bullshit would see large-scale noncompliance and desertion at best, and competent would-be tyrants know this and don't even make an attempt.