Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[Lawman]

False dichotomy

What you get to do with these cheap point solutions, is very rapidly change those designs to specific missions or in response to enemy capabilities. Evolve these things inside the OODA loop of the opponent, while "quantity is its own quality"-ing them.


Indeed AI. Strap in, shipmate.

Automation is software loaded into controllers, and where I work, huge portions of software are now AI-generated. It is scary how well it works today, and that stuff is getting better daily at a scary fast rate.

Drone designs and similar are very often assemblies of pretty well-known tech into unique configurations that give unique capabilities. Guess what is really good at configuring?

Which is entirely dependent on a readily full shelf of inputs to manufacture and a combat environment devoid of impact to our homeland, something that will not exist in a near peer knockdown drag out fight.

Again, for all the “Drones and AI can do everything” magic, we just watched 5 million dollars worth of autonomous hardware get lost in the woods of a CTC rotation 4 months ago. Anduril and others standing their making promises followed by pikachu faces as the promise of what it could didn’t match what it did do.

Make a radio that doesn’t drop fills all the time or an airplane that doesn’t wake up stupid on its APU because it got rain water in the cannon plugs before we go promising the next generation of automated warfare. AI in the decision making process and automating staffs sure, but we are a long ass way from the Terminator promises of people like Palmer Luckey.

 

[BigRed389]

Which is entirely dependent on a readily full shelf of inputs to manufacture and a combat environment devoid of impact to our homeland, something that will not exist in a near peer knockdown drag out fight.

Again, for all the “Drones and AI can do everything” magic, we just watched 5 million dollars worth of autonomous hardware get lost in the woods of a CTC rotation 4 months ago. Anduril and others standing their making promises followed by pikachu faces as the promise of what it could didn’t match what it did do.

Make a radio that doesn’t drop fills all the time or an airplane that doesn’t wake up stupid on its APU because it got rain water in the cannon plugs before we go promising the next generation of automated warfare. AI in the decision making process and automating staffs sure, but we are a long ass way from the Terminator promises of people like Palmer Luckey.

I think both things can be true. AI is absolutely not at a point where we should have to worry about SkyNet taking control of fully automated Terminators any time soon.

That said, both AI capability and the computing hardware to enable it has been improving rapidly. By rapidly, in some areas, those measures have been improving exponentially. It’s not universally true, but across many key metrics, such as GPU throughput, and AI model benchmarks, it is.

Which is what makes it hard to predict when we’ll suddenly see those drone shows go from mere party tricks to deadly autonomous swarms, and the risk of falling behind that curve are significant.

 

[NoMoreMrNiceGuy]

Make a radio that doesn’t drop fills all the time or an airplane that doesn’t wake up stupid on its APU because it got rain water in the cannon plugs before we go promising the next generation of automated warfare. AI in the decision making process and automating staffs sure, but we are a long ass way from the Terminator promises of people like Palmer Luckey.