Trae (Trey) Stephens

And you can imagine this in every domain.

It's not just air, but you can imagine this on surface vessels, with submarines, with ground vehicles.

We're moving in that direction with these attributable assets.

Yeah.

Well, no, I don't think humans are obsolete.

There is a human in the loop that is accountable for the decisions that are being made.

One of the things that comes up frequently when you start talking about autonomy is this idea of full autonomy versus human-in-the-loop autonomy, which is the idea that when you're about to make a lethal decision, there has to be a human that hits the button that says, do it.

But that hasn't been the case for decades already.

There's CWIS, the close-in weapon system that is on naval vessels now.

it automatically engages with threats, aerial threats, to the naval surface vessels.

There's no human directing the cannon as it's shooting at things and shoot them out of the sky.

In fact, there can't be because the entire challenge that it's facing is moving at superhuman speeds to eliminate threats.

But there should be a human that's accountable for these decisions.

There's someone somewhere that you're going to be able to shake a stick at and say, this robot did something that

it shouldn't have done.

And it's your responsibility to know what mission you've set the robot off to do.

And so I think that we're really moving in the direction of more autonomy that is engaging with fewer of these manned, exquisite platforms that are very expensive.

But there will be people that are making the decisions about how those missions are conducted, what strategies are utilized, and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, so much of this is probably driven by geopolitical realities rather than hard technical realities.

If we were to enter into a major global conflict with a near-peer foreign adversary, we would probably try to accelerate to that much more quickly.