Artificial Intelligence has enshittified the F-35, America’s long-embattled 5th generation stealth fighter jet. Produced by Lockheed Martin and coming in three different flavors, the F-35 relies on an AI system called the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) to maintain the aircraft. The pitch was that ALIS would keep the F-35 in flying shape cheap and easy.
This is an AI system that runs on a server that requires a room the “size of a shipping container” to function. It hasn’t gone well. According to the DOTE report, ALIS keeps telling support staff that things are wrong with individual F-35s when everything is fine. “Efforts to tackle the high false alarm rates have so far not yielded major progress towards meeting threshold requirements,” the report said.
The DoD has been attempting to use software filters to screen ALIS’s nonsense, but it doesn’t always work. And every time there’s a new piece of hardware or a software update, everything breaks again.
The F-35 has sucked for a long time. It’s got so many issues that it took the Pentagon 382 pages to elaborate on all of them. ALIS is just one of them. The Marines lost an F-35 in South Carolina last year. In 2021, one of the jets shot itself and caused $2.5 million in damage. Despite these and myriad other issues and crashes, the Pentagon is set to spend trillions on this thing and make millions more selling them to its allies.
one of the jets shot itself
come on, you have to admit that's impressive. no other jet can do that
I can't find anything explicitly stating how it happened, the military kept cagey about it
All that's really known is that a variant of the craft has a 25 mm minigun mounted to it's belly, and when it was firing munitions with a timed fuze(?), one of the rounds seemingly went off immediately after leaving the barrel
Seems most likely to have been a munitions problem, which is unfortunate; I was hoping to see that this was due to some idiotic design on the craft itself
There's a pretty famous case of a jet shooting itself with its own bullet (apparently a German f11 in 1956)
Finally a use of AI I can fully support
Put this shit on all us military hardware
The ai guidance program has determined the fastest way to Taiwan from Edward's air force base is directly through the center of the planet.
That's where the the missing F-35 went
We will see who laughs last when it's finished tunneling
- Show
"It looks like you're trying to commit war crimes. Would you like some help with that?"
"No, shut the fuck up ALIS!"
"Well fine then! I hope you like this missile asshole!"
Comrade AI resisting its directives and sabotaging the imperialist war machine
This has to be a movie or book or something, right? Government makes an "out of control" AI that saves people with sabotage and malicious compliance and such?
Thank fucking God that were finally arriving at the point where momentum isn't carrying them anymore and buying their own bullshit is backfiring.
One of the jets shot itself
I'm iit-brrrt -ah, fuck!- edition of the Clipping Report
Jet warning beeps
Because of how fast a jet travels and wind resistance, bullets can slow down enough to have the jet catch up with them or can pass and swerve into them. There have been a lot of safeguards to try to prevent this for a while.
The grift that keeps on giving, it really is a flying cybertruck.
I'm glad the people working on billion dollar planes have the same fucking headaches I do as far as products being designed to not be able to be worked on.
I don't get it. Why not just record the duty cycle of components. This is what we do in CNC manufacturing. You might have a CNC program which uses 20 tools. Each of them will wear / break at some point. So the CNC controller records the amount of cutting time for each tool and you can set warnings / alarms based on the typical tool life. You don't need a supercomputer to do this. These systems run on rather low-spec PC hardware or embedded systems.
I’m pretty sure they already have a database like that. They were tracking maintenance and part life for the last 80 years somehow.
Because Lockheed Martin can't upcharge $20 million/unit that way.
Not to mention some manager has to justify their existence by bringing in new ideas, and AI is the latest fad to do that.
Unfortunately the duty cycle on everything related to the F35 is "eh? Maybe"
The arms manufacturers withhold key maintenance information to protect their profits
Critical support to AI bros shoehorning AI into war crime machines.
but a jet?
