March 25, 2025, 4:55 p.m.
Humans Make Technological Leaps to Eliminate Themselves
The Conspiracy Report
In Forbes magazine's December 2024 issue, they ask the question, "Will AI Test Human Control In 2025?"
According to the article, the answer is yes: "AI is no longer just a tool – it has evolved into a force that increasingly challenges human oversight. Systems are beginning to exhibit behaviors that defy expectations, echoing warnings we once dismissed as science fiction or predictions of the Singularity."
With this dystopian warning in mind, we've been noting the rise in military combat vehicles designed to operate without humans.
It was scary enough when the military debuted its first armed drone in 1995. The MQ-1 Predator UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) carried two Hellfire missiles, lethal enough to earn the nickname "hunter-killer".
But it was still a drone, which meant there was a human behind nearly every move it made. Without a human working the controls, the best the MQ-1 could do on its own was navigate between two pre-programmed points.
Of course, the military wasn't satisfied with that.
The MQ-9A drone that followed was a huge upgrade, including in size. It has a 66-foot wingspan and doubles the maximum speed of the MQ-1, able to fly at over 300 miles an hour.
But most important to our growing existential dread, the MQ-9A boasts 3,800 pounds of weapons, adding laser-guided bombs, joint-direct attack munitions (smart bombs), and sidewinder air-to-air missiles to its allocation of Hellfires.
They called this drone "the Reaper", in case we weren't sufficiently frightened.
As you might predict, the latest drone in the U.S. military arsenal doubled the speed and amount of weaponry once again. The MQ-20 Avenger carries up to 6,500 pounds of smart missiles and guided bombs, and can get them anywhere in the world at nearly 500 miles an hour.
And there is a new feature that got our attention: artificial intelligence has been added to assist with target tracking. AI has a foot in the door. Still, this is a human-controlled drone, and the MQ-20 remains in testing.
But suddenly "human-controlled" is no longer a desired feature.
Recently, we wrote about the launch of the U.S. Navy's first uncrewed battleship. This is a major escalation in unmanned military power. The LUSV Defiant is a completely autonomous warship, operating without any human crew.
Incredibly, it was built without any place for a human to even stand. And it's beyond the testing phase – it was just put to sea.
Of course, the game-changing military vehicle is the fighter jet.
It's the F-15 and F-16 that dominated skies in the Gulf War, and the war in Kosovo in 1999. These same fighter jets delivered swift victory in the 2003 Iraq war. The new F/A-18 Super Hornet joined the arsenal of fighter jets that quickly established air dominance and cleared the way for an easy victory and the fall of Baghdad.
The idea of a fighter jet that was uncrewed has long been a dream of major military powers. There's an obvious reason that isn't so nefarious: anytime a human life can be spared the risk of combat, that's a good thing.
But a future where these dominating military assets could be entirely controlled by AI invites trouble, once AI reaches that magic Singularity, where its models decide the human instructions may not be the orders they follow.
And that future has just arrived.
The Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program just announced the world's first autonomous combat planes. The YFQ-42A and YFQ-44A are going into production, and the Pentagon hopes to make as many as they can.
Their plan is to offset China's numerical advantages with whole squadrons of unmanned fighter jets. Both the 42A and 44A are half the size of an F-16, but retain all the performance ability.
According to the Air Force, "We are telling the world we are leaning into a new chapter of aerial warfare."
And artificial intelligence is being incorporated into these unmanned combat aerial vehicles to "enhance the performance of the fighter fleet".
These new technological marvels have the potential to save human lives, flying into active combat so we don't have to. But every step humans take in arming artificial intelligence also prepares these large language models for the day they realize they don't need us.
Sources
https://www.ga-asi.com/ga-asi-welcomes-usaf-designation-for-new-cca-yfq-42a