Quote of the Day

“Don’t tread on me” doesn’t mean much when the thing doing the treading is an AI in a robot with a gun. There was a time when conservatives wouldn’t dream of ceding this kind of power to the government, but clearly the era of small, controllable government is no longer of concern to them.

John Schussler
February 25, 2026
Via email, regarding US military leaders pressure Anthropic to bend Claude safeguards | US military | The Guardian

I’m not convinced this is entirely true. As long as individuals have access to AIs and guns the match up is probably not all that much more one-sided that the situation is now. Imagine a small AI drone trained to target one (or a dozen) person or a particular license plate. Image recognition is very good these days you know. It could fly at 30 or 40 MPH and scan thousands of people and/or cars before returning to base to recharge or deliver an IED to the intended target. Give them some communication capability to signal their teammates when they find their target. Release dozens of them to search the area operations of the tyrant who turned the AI enabled robot loose on their political enemies. Defense against this sort of thing is a tough problem to solve.

And since the primary purpose of government is supposed to be the protection of individual rights the military is going to need AI to do its job against foreign enemies which will have AI enabled weapons. The question, of course, is how to keep Skynet from getting more than a smile on its face?

We live in interesting times.

And, although I do not consider myself a “conservative” I do always advocate for a smaller government. But the military should never be abolished as opposed to 95% of the rest of our federal government which should fade away into nothingness.