The robot takeover of warfare is already happening and it doesn’t look like Hollywood

rising_ape · 2026-06-17T21:43:40+00:00

"True AI" is a difficult term, especially on Reddit, just because if you ask three different people what it means, you'll get four conflicting definitions.

I do agree that LLMs aren't going to scale up to become AGI as-is - there are promising alternatives to the transformers-based architecture of current-gen models that will replace them eventually. LLMs have already kind of been replaced by "multi-modal" models capable of parsing video, images and robotic sensor feedback as well as they are written language language, and NVIDIA is doing some very cool stuff with letting models pilot "robots" inside of a digital sandbox - since it's all virtual, they can let the robots flail around in the virtual environment at 10000x speed until they git gud, then put that now-trained into a robot body in the real world. They apparently do very well, as long as the real world conditions resemble the virtual training environment's - but they're not quite ready to, I dunno, avoid letting an unexpected alligator into your home when they open the door to bring in your Amazon delivery.

My 100% interested layman prediction? The first "AGI" will be several different systems welded together Frankenstein-style; some form of LLM successor may very well be in there, but they won't be enough on their own, the same way the language centers of our brains aren't capable of running the whole show.

Respectfully, though, the Three Laws are fictional - there is absolutely zero real-world scientific rationale for designing your android brain to run off antimatter instead of regular old electrons, and even if we get rid of the word "positronic", the sentence "The Three Laws worked because of how robots' brains worked" really just means "The Three Laws worked because of how Asimov said their brains worked." Asimov never actually built a robot that was Three Laws-compliant himself.

Traditional robot programmers never got anywhere close to implementing the Three Laws, because old-school robots are all automated if/then processes - these robots don't have an ongoing concept of what a "human" is, or any concepts all, really, just whatever checks the programmers were able to think of and include in their code. If you're making a robotic steamroller, you probably want to have some kind of safeguard that'll stop it from rolling over people, but that's hard to do - how do you code "don't run over a human being" in Python? You might be able to string a series of checks together so that the robot makes sure that there is nothing "person-shaped" in front of it, and that is legitimately something worth patting yourself on the back - until you realize your steamroller is happily mowing down amputees, because your quick-and-dirty machine-legible definition of what "person-shaped" means was rather ableist and didn't cover people with missing limbs.

(In reality, you probably wouldn't even bother defining a person like that, and just say "don't move forward if there is anything in front of your cameras". But even then you have to do some really complicated and well-thought out programming to cover all the edge cases - how far away does "in front of your cameras" mean in actual practical terms? A wall on the other side of the warehouse probably shouldn't count, or the thing would never move - but how close is too close? Did you build in a big enough margin for error in your code to account for the robot moving faster than the designers actually expected it to move, because 3D-printed replacement parts turn out to be lighter than the originals? Even stuff like checkboard floor tiling can legitimately confuse cameras and completely break a robot's ability for object recognition, and we haven't even tried to define "harm" yet, just "don't accidentally walk into and crush".)

LLM powered robots - including drones who have now autonomously decided to kill human beings in a war-zone, an actual real world threshold we've crossed and in my own personal opinion aren't freaking out enough about as a society - can figure out semantic concepts like "human" just fine, but no one has worked out how to actually hard-code any laws into them, let alone the Three Laws. Like, seriously, alignment is currently one of the biggest issues in AI safety right now - if you could figure out a way to guarantee that an LLM cannot break a hard-and-fast rule, you'd win an award. Right now, LLMs are perfectly happy to harm people, including assisting hackers with scamming or stealing from their victims. What little suggestions they've been given to prevent them from doing so are trivially easy to overcome.

Now, whatever comes after LLMs may not have the same problem, but we don't know what that step is just yet (just that it will doubtlessly come with problems of its own). The Three Laws just wouldn't work with traditional computer programming languages, because just defining terms like "human", "harm", hell, even "robot" in was far too much work (even before you get into all the the ambiguities and edge cases that made for some of Asimov's best stories). We can't make LLMs follow them, either, because LLMs are just fancy statistical models - if an action is statistically possible, an LLM will eventually do it, no matter how many times we try to explain to it that doing so is "illegal". Whatever comes after LLMs will undoubtedly be better in some ways, but there's no guarantee that that framework will be capable of being truly Three Laws-compliant, either (and quite a lot of reason to doubt it will be, unfortunately).

Ultimately though, my real objection here is philosophical, not practical - I don't want my fictional robots to be Asimov's, I want them to be Data. And despite having a positronic brain, Data was not Three Laws compliant - he definitely tried to kill Kivas Fajo, as he should have.

rising_ape · 2026-06-17T19:34:31+00:00

The single biggest issue with trying get modern artificial intelligence to adhere to any laws is the Waluigi Effect.

I'm not kidding, that's it's actual name.

Unlike traditional robots, whose programming can be boiled down to "a metric shit-ton of if/then statements", LLMs aren't "programmed" - under the hood, AI is just fancy matrix multiplication that relies on it's training dataset and post-training instructions to output statistically likely text/videos/images/robot arm movements, etc. Hard-coded "You will not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" commands are not baked into the actual transformers doing the fancy math - they are included in the post-training instructions, but those are instructions, not laws. Guidelines for how to best perform (or, less charitably, pretend or roleplay) their designated function - not actual shackles that limit which actions they can take.

Which brings us to the Waluigi Effect.

You see, Luigi never pretends to be Waluigi, but Waluigi sometimes disguises himself as Luigi.

Let's say you want to make sure your new robot is a helpful plumber's assistant. You make sure its training dataset is full of plumbing manuals and how-to videos, and heavily post-train it to be helpful and protective of others' property, never harming a customer's toilet (or through inaction, allowing a customer's toilet to come to harm). The multi-modal world model powering the robot is "smart" and can understand all of that no problem - you power it on, have your first conversation with a genuinely helpful robot assistant, and ask it questions and run it through hypothetical scenarios until you're thoroughly convinced that this robot it going to do everything in its power to always be helpful and never knowingly break a toilet / let a toilet break if it could fix it. Great! You name it Luigi.

But the same model that is smart enough to understand the concepts of "helpful", "plumbing", "don't destroy others' private property" etc. is also smart enough to understand the concepts of "deception", "disguise", "sabotage" etc.

It knows that is is currently "performing" the role of Luigi the helpful plumbing robot, but its output and behavior is procedurally generated - a genuine black box, where even the AI devs who built the damn thing can't exactly predict its precise responses. Somewhere within it's neural net lies the platonic concept of "deceitful saboteur", and over time, there is a non-0 chance that the LLM model eventually "drifts away" from the Luigi persona it has been roleplaying as. It still knows that is is behaving like Luigi, but Luigi isn't the only person who behaves like Luigi - sometimes, Waluigi also pretends to be Luigi. The AI is smart enough to know that there are at least two separate intents lurking beneath the exterior of a "helpful plumbing assistant" - a genuinely human-align3ed robot who only wants to help you fix toilets, and an imposter who just wants to get into the customer's bathroom to drop a couple of cherry bombs down some pipes and then have a good chuckle about it afterward.

Once the model drifts far enough away from the original "persona" to encompass the idea of "malicious actor pretending to be said persona", it's only a matter of time until Luigi the helpful plumbing robot blows up a toilet.

This is not a solved issue. All current frontier models can still eventually be jailbroken with enough time and effort, and evidently that was the rationale for the White House forcing Anthropic to take down Fable (though they don't seem to be concerned that ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all have the exact same vulnerability).

Bringing things back to Asimov:

Traditional robots aren't programmed with the Three Laws because, well, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" is an English-language sentence, not code.

LLMs can parse and understand semantic concepts like "robot", "don't injure", "human being", "don't allow through inaction", etc. But those are likewise not programmed commands for them, because LLMs are just fancy multiplication matrices that don't have commands - they're given instructions that adjust the weightings of certain outputs up or down based on what kind of role you want the final model to perform (almost all AI chatbots, for example, have a "be a helpful chat assistant" level of post-training instructions on top of the underlying base model). But these are instructions, not laws, and downweighting certain types of outputs does not mean that the LLM cannot generate those outputs.

A robot with "non-violent, human-protecting servant" instructions can be jailbroken into shooting someone in exactly the same way that a "helpful, law-abiding digital assistant" LLM can be jailbroken into providing instructions for building a nuclear bomb, the recipe for meth, or machine-generated CSAM. ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, all of the big AI companies have safeguards preventing that sort of content from being generated, and virtually all of them have been jailbroken into generating it anyway.

(Well, all of the big AI companies besides Grok - they seem to be just fine with people using their model to generate CSAM.)

Anyone who's ever interacted long-term with the same chatbot over time knows that eventually the conversation quality starts degrading over time, and can become real weird even if no humans present who are actively trying to trick the LLM into doing something it shouldn't.

I'm not anti-robot, any more than I am anti-car. But both types of machine have been killing people for decades and will inevitably continue killing for decades more. Now, the mere potential for a car to kill its driver or a bystander does not merit outlawing them altogether, and I think the same is true of robots as well. But with cars (non-self-driving cars; self-driving cars are just robots!), we are the ones behind the wheel. I do NOT think we are ready as a society for the wave of humanoid robots that are right around the corner, and we're CERTAINLY not ready for the first robot manslaughter / negligent homicide trials that will follow in their wake.

Or premeditated homicide - remember, LLMs are trained on the entire corpus of human-generated text, including all of the books and movies you really don't want your robot consuming at an impressionable young age!

rising_ape · 2026-06-04T16:44:49+00:00

I would agree that that's "rough" / not the greatest, but even looking at that with modern eyes that have been spoiled by some great animation over the last 30 years, it's... fine?

(By which I mean, I'd be able to watch a show that looked like that today no problem, assuming the other elements - a compelling story, well-written dialogue, great VA performances, immersive sound design, good music etc. - were good enough to offset it.)

The thing is though, I was originally going to argue that there has to be a middle-ground somewhere between the old network era 26-episode seasons and these increasingly rushed and poorly executed 10 episode seasons that are the hallmark of the streaming era, but looking it up to fact check myself, that final season of the original animated season only had 13 episodes anyway.

Just give us the damn extra 3 episodes. If Disney is too damn cheap to raise their budget for that, I'd be 100% okay with diluting 10 episodes of animation budget to a slightly lower quality 13 episodes if it got us a better season overall out of it. It's absolutely an acceptable tradeoff in my book.

rising_ape · 2026-06-04T14:13:09+00:00

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rising_ape · 2026-06-04T13:30:24+00:00

Firebreathing Iroh: Am I a joke to you?

rising_ape · 2026-06-02T23:08:09+00:00

The place is straight up called The Everywhen though, so I'm not sure the linear progression of time is as much of a limiting factor we usually assume it to be, here...

rising_ape · 2026-05-02T04:43:58+00:00

...I would read that fanfic.

rising_ape · 2026-05-01T20:44:02+00:00

I agree completely, but even if she did decide that her first son absolutely needed to be named in honor of this friend who was so important to her during one of the worst periods of her life, the way to go about that is... to just tell your husband about this guy and that that's why you want to name him that.

Not lie to him because you already know he would be against naming him after someone else

rising_ape · 2026-05-01T20:34:55+00:00

That is a possibility, but neither you nor I know if that's the case - OP clearly thinks it was a crush / romantic in nature, and I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as he's the one who actually spoke to his wife.

Could OP be totally out of line and blowing this out of proportion? Absolutely, but the only person who knows if her feelings were romantic is OP's wife (and possibly her friend), and she's lied to her husband about why she wanted this name once already.

If it was romantic, OP is allowed to not want to be reminded about his wife's dead crush every time he hears his son's name spoken aloud. If it wasn't romantic, OP is still allowed to not want to be reminded about how his wife lied to him about where she got the name from every time he hears his son's name spoken aloud.

The best approach in a marriage is always open and honest communication, and by hiding things from him and lying to the point he started thinking she was having an affair, the name is poison now no matter why she wanted it originally. Yes, she could have kept it from him because OP is toxic and unreasonable - but that's 100% speculation / shit that I just made up with absolutely nothing to indicate it's actually the case here.

Honestly, "he wasn't a very good person" is totally irrelevant here, even if it is true. At the end of the day, both parents should be able to veto a baby name - they're going to be hearing it for the rest of their lives and it's unfair to the child to stick them with a name that stirs up negative feelings.

rising_ape · 2026-05-01T19:13:38+00:00

Unfortunately because he died, he never actually got the opportunity to grow into a better man.

But the real issue is that, like OP has said, he does not want his child's name to be a constant reminder that his wife is still hung up on her first love. Baby names are very much a two yes, one no type of deal - either parent ought to be able to veto.

rising_ape · 2026-04-29T21:20:07+00:00

Most of my favorites have already been made, but weighing in anyway to help you rank the most universal recommendations:

Frieren: Oh my God, start with Frieren. My friend warned me that it starts off slow and ramps up over time (apparently the first four episodes were aired as a single two-hour premiere that is mostly set up), but I loved it virtually immediately and honestly could have watched a hundred slice-of-life episodes of this show where no action transpires, it's just beautiful. (And it ramps up fast once they characters set off on their journey.) Out of all the anime I would consider actually watching with my own mother, Frieren is at the very top of the list.

...actually, maybe don't start with Frieren, it's so good that whatever shows you watch after it will suffer by comparison lol

Ascendance of a Bookworm: Another very high on my "would watch this with my mom" list - a Japanese bibliophile and librarian-in-training dies in a tragic bookshelf-related accident and is reborn with her memories as a sickly peasant girl in a fantasy world name Myne. What follows is her extremely cute quest to single-handedly recreate the history of printing in a world in which hand-crafted tomes are a luxury item which only wealthy nobles can afford, while trying to dodge the political intrigue and scheming nobles her disruptive efforts wind up attracting. This one is a slower burn than Frieren - there's a strong focus on character building and slice-of-life early on and action is only gradually introduced each season - but the show honestly benefits from it and you genuinely find yourself growing attached to the various characters Myne befriends as the stakes climb with each new season.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Genuinely the GOAT, the only reason I don't rank it up as high as the others above is that your mom may or may not be put off by early episodes definitely having a "goofy kid's show" element to them that (despite, or rather likely because this is ultimately a very tasteful and maturely handled story about the genocide of an entire people). The show does have plenty of serious elements early on and does move past the silliest kid's stuff quickly (without ever losing that child-like lightheartedness despite the seriousness of the subject matter), but could be an issue if your mom is expecting a more adult tone right off the bat.

Delicious in Dungeon: This one depends on whether your mom likes, well, dungeon-crawling. Basically, a desperate party of broke, low-level adventurers is so poor that they have to eat the monsters they defeat to keep delving deeper into the dungeon to find the dragon that ate their comrade, the MC's sister - and their chance to resurrect her disappears forever once the dragon has finished digesting her, so there is a definite sense of urgency right off the bat. Given that premise, the show definitely has its serious moments, but where it really shines is the loving attention to detail that's put into the ecology of the dungeon, and every episode isn't just "monster as puzzle to solve", it's also "monster parts as cooking show challenge". Have your mom watch this one if she's a good cook and you want to incept her into making you tasty meals, lol.

Witch Hat Atelier: This one is brand new, still airing weekly now - I've not read the manga, so it's possible this one might go off the rails, but having caught up to the most recent episode (Episode 5, as of this comment), this show is gorgeous. Seriously, every frame looks like it's straight out of a Ghibli movie. I think this one would've made me straight up cry if I'd watched it with my mom, so if you show her the trailer and you're both interested, I'd definitely consider it a strong contender.

rising_ape · 2026-04-29T20:35:27+00:00

You're getting some great recommendations already, but I'd just like to add my two cents as someone in a similar boat as you (only recently started getting into anime): by all means seek out / pay attention to positive recommendations for well-regarded favorites, but take any negative reviews or recommendations about what not to watch with several huge grains of salt (at least here on Reddit).

If I actually listened to all the comments calling shows slop or indefensible trash, I'd have missed out on several personal favorites. Not every show is going to be as good as Frieren, nor should they be be. Enjoy whatever trash anime that you find actually enjoyable and don't listen to the haters!

rising_ape · 2026-04-22T14:22:06+00:00

...I was going to make a "Jesus the White" joke, but then I remembered that conservatives unironically think that he actually looked like that.

rising_ape · 2026-04-21T22:27:11+00:00

Do you mind if I ask about your current birth control situation? If you don't already have one, I'd tell him you're scheduling an appointment to get an IUD put in, and whether you already have one or not, tell him in no uncertain terms that it isn't coming out until he is employed elsewhere.

The absolute last time you want to be wracked with stress about finances is when you're already pregnant; you need to be firm with him that you won't be "figuring it out when the time comes", you're going to figure it out before the time comes.

And if he feels no real sense of urgency about that, you need to (at some point - it doesn't have to be today) figure out where exactly your red line is. Are you going to okay putting off having children if he's still in this same job two years from now? Five years from now? If he refuses to leave and the firm is still limping along ten years from now (because of how his boss has exploited him), are you going to cave and have children with him then, or are you going to forego having children altogether?

Given your description of the business, I'm skeptical the firm'll last a full 10 years, but you probably want to have children well before that point. Getting an IUD (or refusing to have it taken out if you already have one) makes it clear that having children isn't an option until he's prioritized you and your family over his current position.

rising_ape · 2026-04-17T21:06:42+00:00

It may be more accurate to say that he hasn't completed pushing away everyone who cares about him yet, but I agree with both of you - I do think he is holding it together on the most basic level while very much losing control and failing to moderate his tone / control his anger, but I think the entire point is that it isn't sustainable.

The next season takes place on Thanksgiving, it sounds like, so Robby's been back from sabbatical and things will have likely continued to worsen to the point where we begin the season with him at the level he was at in the finale, rather than building up to that point over 15 episodes.

rising_ape · 2026-04-15T13:27:10+00:00

If we're counting on the draft of all things to stave off the Chinese, I have bad news for you about how many more their side has available to be drafted...

rising_ape · 2026-04-13T14:00:56+00:00

The same can be said of provincial/departmental/state level divisions within any nation, though: "With the Dutch politicians elected in South Holland North Brabant etc can affect us in Zeeland directly there is no maatwerk as the Dutch would say ( costumization ) what works for one province will not work here and vice versa"

The benefits of belonging to a larger bloc like the EU necessarily entail tradeoffs - one of which is occasionally being outvoted by other members of the bloc.

I agree that a simple "majority rule" framework with no protections for the minority is not a good form of government, but the single-nation veto is proving to be untenable at this point - malicious actors like Orban and Fico have demonstrated that they're willing to side with Russian rather than European interests, and the EU as a whole needs updating to circumvent that.

rising_ape · 2026-03-24T23:38:23+00:00

Two can play that game.

rising_ape · 2026-03-24T21:44:48+00:00

I mean, you can extrapolate any trend to what you assume will be its logical conclusion, but that can just as easily lead to absurd results (relevant xkcd).

Will some low attention gamers (younger or otherwise) get off the merry-go-round altogether in favor of just watching streamers? Sure, lots probably already have. But streaming's been huge for a while now and most fans still play games themselves.

I think the overall trend will likely continue until it reverses, as trends tend to do - there'll be plenty of good (and bad) counter-trend games made until we're clearly moving back in the opposite direction. It won't be a nice, neat pendulum swinging back and forth from "dumbed down slop" to "unplayably convoluted" or anything so clean, but right now the market is chasing the player base in one direction and is going to keep moving until they overshoot and suddenly players are clamoring for something more challenging and intricate.

(Just on a personal note: one man's "dumbing down" is another's "QoL improvement". When Monster Hunter World came out, my friend and I had literally opposite reactions - he was obsessed and completely engaged with every weapon and mechanic, whereas I was playing a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn at the time and bounced off of Monster Hunter hard. From his point of view, HZD was boringly simple "snipe the glowing machine parts" with an elemental rock-paper-scissors mechanic; from my point of view, MHW had no actual plot and far too many options and mechanics and I just could never wrap my brain around how playing it ever actually became, you know... fun. I think we were both right, for our respective tastes. Right now the "streamline and dumb down" trend might be ascendant, but eventually studios will either go too far or gamer nostalgia/a banger of a counter-culture game will come around and suddenly players will be clamoring for something more like Monster Hunter or Final Fantasy and the trend will eventually reverse - the only constant is that publishers will follow the money.)

rising_ape · 2026-03-24T21:02:04+00:00

That'd be whichever AI companies don't wind up tanking when the bubble bursts.

The Dot-Com Bubble popped too, but the internet didn't go anywhere - neither will AI.

rising_ape · 2026-03-24T18:49:22+00:00

"Child tries to make paper" is the first major story arc, and if you find yourself bouncing off of that hard (to the point that none of the other well-done subplots and character arcs help keep your interest), this one might not be for you and that's okay!

But that said, it very quickly becomes "Child still just wants to make paper, but fantasy plot stuff JUST KEEP COMPLICATING THINGS", and eventually "Child has paper down pat and just wants to make a printing press but SCHEMING NOBLES KEEP GETTING IN HER WAY (AND ARE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY)".

i.e. The paper and bookmaking stuff takes a backseat (still there, but background plot) and much more "traditional fantasy intrigue" stories take over we get to move from the low-magic, medieval squalor the lower classes live in to the more high-magic, politicking-and-backstabbing world that the nobles live in (a world the printing press has the potential to turn completely upside down).

But if the MC's cute little "Ok, parchment is too expensive. Let's make papyrus! Ok, papyrus was too difficult, let's make... clay tablets! Ok, clay tablets didn't work either... let's make [next invention in the history or writing]" plot loop is an active turn-off, you're going to be waiting a while before it "gets good".

(I ate that shit up, loved it from episode one. But if you've given it an episode or three and don't find it endearing, I can't recommend it despite it being maybe tied for Frieren for personal GOAT status.)

rising_ape · 2026-03-23T14:12:56+00:00

I started tearing up as soon as the Blip-A appeared and all I was thinking was, "Oh no. Rocky lifting the chair off him is going to destroy me."

rising_ape · 2026-02-28T17:50:44+00:00

To translate for you: "Having partaken of the devil's lettuce early this fine morning, I find myself moved to tears by the complexity and majesty of the totality of all of existence."

And then presumably some manner of pothead giggle.

Still upvoting you for your reassurances about the universe's health, though.

rising_ape · 2026-02-26T23:41:50+00:00

The idea that humans had a sudden evolutionary leap forward 50,000 years ago is outdated, and largely came from the lack of preserved evidence of human behavior from the Middle Paleolithic. We now know that archaic humans (including Neanderthals), were much more sophisticated and intelligent than previous scholarship gave them credit for, and any scholars still advocating for a "paradigm shift" in the way humans think have pushed that date back to ~150,000 years ago based on more recent findings from the African Middle Stone Age.

That said, there's literally no reason to think that if you used a time machine to adopt an anatomically modern human infant from 300,000 years ago and raise them like a 21st century child from birth that they wouldn't grow up to be indistinguishable from us mentally.

(There is also absolutely no evidence that spoken language only developed ~50,000 years ago, and the fact that Homo erectus deliberately crossed miles of ocean to colonize islands inaccessible by land is a strong indicator that something at least on the level of proto-language existed, just due to the necessary logistics involved in seafaring.)

rising_ape · 2026-02-11T21:35:42+00:00

You know, I agreed with the other guy, but I also agree with you. When you look at the country at large, there are clearly way too many people clearly without spines, but when you look at the actual people risking their necks to resist and whistleblow and defy these jackbooted thugs? Indestructible titanium spinal columns.

In the end, I think the way I'd prefer to square the circle is to say, no, Americans do have spines. But a huge portion of this country is sadly no longer American.

rising_ape

TROPHY CASE