We have it under control ...

Anduril’s autonomous air vehicle, Fury, which recently began production at the company’s new factory outside Columbus, Ohio.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times

For years, yours truly has waxed "poetic" about autonomous weapons as this tech can and has gone sideways on numerous occasions because the question to ask is, who is the enemy because if the ID or circumstances of a given situation is incorrectly analyzed, bad things happen.

U.S. officials pushed domestic defense companies to step up. Last month, Anduril, a defense technology start-up in California, began manufacturing A.I.-backed, self-flying drones that appeared similar to the ones shown in China. Production at a factory outside Columbus, Ohio, started three months ahead of schedule, part of an effort to close the gap with China, one defense official said.

China’s military display and the U.S. countermove were part of an escalating global arms race over A.I.-backed autonomous weapons and defense systems. Designed to operate by themselves using A.I., the technology reduces the need for human intervention in decisions like when to hit a moving target or defend against an attack.

In recent years, many nations have quietly engaged in a contest of one-upmanship over these arsenals, including drones that identify and strike targets without human command, self-flying fighter jets that coordinate attacks at speeds and altitudes that few human pilots can reach, and central systems run by A.I. that analyze intelligence to recommend airstrike targets quickly.

The problem

In Washington, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who had previously worked in intelligence at the Defense Department, was assessing whether A.I. could solve a more immediate problem. The U.S. military was collecting so much data — drone footage, satellite imagery, intercepted signals — that nobody could make sense of it all.

The "solution"

In 2019, Palantir, a data analytics company co-founded by the tech investor Peter Thiel,
took over Maven. 

The dataset

“The four years of brutality on the battlefield in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the world,” said Mr. Horowitz, the former Pentagon official.

The money

In recent months, Ukraine began sharing its troves of battlefield data with Palantir and other firms so A.I. systems can better learn to fight wars.

A drone mother ship that can launch swarms of smaller drones, shown at the 2024 Zhuhai Airshow.Credit...Tingshu Wang/Reuters

Yet deterrence assumes rationality, while A.I. weapons are designed to move faster than human reason. In exercises dating to 2020, researchers explored how autonomous systems could accelerate escalation and erode human control — with some alarming results.

In one scenario, a system operated by the United States and Japan responded to a missile launch from North Korea by autonomously firing an unexpected counterattack.

“The speed of autonomous systems led to inadvertent escalation,” said the report by analysts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization that works with the military.

Jack Shanahan, a retired lieutenant general and former director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said A.I. would put “even more emphasis on moving faster and faster.”
Credit...Artur Widak/Anadolu, via Getty Images

General Shanahan, who retired from the military in 2020 and is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank, said the race he had helped start kept him up at night. Governments must set clear boundaries before the technology outruns their control, he said.

Read the entire NYTimes piece to see why tech, like creativity, has no morality.
Remember, as per quantum mechanics, there is no certitude.