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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18448 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Running inference on data centers is a contingent and temporary state of affairs. At a minimum, autonomous weapons will have locally-running AI to protect against jamming.

Drones might have ai on them, but it will be a specialized ai and not a humanity ending skynet superintelligence on each drone. And no they are not going to form a hivemind

The fact that the fallback AI in individual drones isn't an existential threat does not imply that the sum of drones, coordinated by a vastly more capable AI when they're not being actively jammed, isn't one threat.

Your argument fully generalises to "The fact that the combined C4ISR apparatus of the US armed forces isn't present in totality in the mind of every single USAF pilot (and no, human pilots aren't telepathic), means that the US air force is completely harmless".

Probably worth keeping in mind that the drones cannot be coordinated out of line-of-sight. This isn't a really big deal if you have access to, say, Starlink, but short of that it's a huge problem. In the future, weapons that can effectively take care of Starlink can be expected to come online (if they aren't deployed already), so you'd need massive and very vulnerable backup communications network.

I think the bigger problem, though, is that your commander-in-chief is a massive huge immobile building that cannot be replaced. In a war between humans, killing a single person is generally understood to change little, but massive huge immobile buildings that cannot be replaced are pretty well understood not to be survivable.

Really the upshot is that if we permit a super-intelligent and evil AI to control a vertically-integrated supply chain that terminates in the military resources of a nation-state, it could in fact pose a serious treat to us. But this isn't really a unique problem, it's the same threat we face from other nation-states and insurgent groups.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but

it’s the same threat we face from other nation-states

No! It only converges on the same threat if the AI commander is roughly as capable as a human!

Right now we’re around the Saddam Hussein level. AI is too expensive and incompetent to replace a real military leader. The competence barely matters; to paraphrase a philosopher, I have yet to meet one who could outsmart JDAM. But that first one is the real problem.

If AI gets cheap enough to replace trained losses, modern decapitation tactics fall apart. America can no longer bomb any Iranian who knows how to plan a missile strike. Ukrainians can no longer hollow out Russia’s entire officer corps. Competence becomes materiel.

I can’t decide if this favors any particular strategies other than decapitation. I do think it turns a lot of winnable fights unwinnable.

Ironically I think it will be easier to decapitate AIs, at least in the medium term. And likely a viable strategy, even if they aren't in charge of the army, simply as an extension of the age-old tactic of disrupting enemy communications.

Your claim still requires a vastly superior coordination ai which is running inference on data centers. Which is exactly the comment I'm responding to.

There will be AI all the way down. The strongest AI running in the Cheyenne DC, then subordinate AIs at various command centers, division HQs and so on down to the last soldier and drone, each level dumber than the last, but still good enough to perform its immediate task without additional guidance from above. Otherwise, a single attack would be able to cripple the whole military.

The whole system will have to be self-healing as well. If your battalion HQ is destroyed together with its AI, company HQ AIs will automatically attach themselves to other battallion-level AIs in the same brigade.

You don't think autonomous drones, designed and incentivized to mimck soldiers, would form a hivemind?

I've talked about this a bit before, but you wouldn't generally put a general-purpose intelligence system on drones (and you wouldn't have drones mimic soldiers).

The drones would be designed with a threat library that would need to be updated regularly, and insofar as they acted autonomously, they would do it in response to their threat library or otherwise very specific programming (e.g. "return fire" or "make this a no-fly zone.")

They probably wouldn't use LLMs unless they had a very small one to understand natural language communications. For stuff like weapons engagements they would probably use deterministic logic trees and perhaps computer vision for target recognition. Running, say, Fable on a drone would be a massive waste of payload capacity and require tremendous amounts of cooling and power. Most of Fable is dedicated to doing things that an autonomous drone has no need to do.

They would have mesh or "hive" connections, certainly, a lot of which would be to route information "upstairs" to their command. Using drones as a distributed computing space would make them exceptionally vulnerable to jamming.

It's not like any of this is particularly new or even particularly speculative by the way, the Soviets were working on anti-ship missiles with swarm logic to destroy US aircraft carriers.

I can imagine if edge compute becomes cheap enough, that we get smart drones that intelligently solve problems and take initiative to complete the objective. Rather than dumb drones that just go to a location and shoot everything that looks like an enemy.

Ehhh, sure, but it's not going to be current LLMs because word predictors and math solvers are not relevant to battlefield problems. That also throws out that the existing breakthroughs are in areas where there is a plethora of data or the ability to create new data comparatively cheaply in a quantified manner. Such data pipelines do not exist for military based problems and unlike data scraping the internet for comparatively low risk, scraping classified data, beyond technical feasibility, is a quick way to end up in a 4x4 cell in Fort Leavenworth.

Sure, I don't disagree.

I think (in the near future) that you're more likely to see this in ships than small airborne drones, though. ("Drone" can mean a lot of things, sometimes I assume without clarification that people are thinking of little FPV drones. Putting a lot of compute on a ship makes a lot more sense.)

You think soldiers would form a hive mind? Grunts would be running around like headless chickens without a chain of command.

And no a chain of command is not a hivemind even if it has some collaboration.

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