Unrestricted autonomous AI weapons are uniquely dangerous because they remove the human backsop for democracy and create untraceable, cheaply-executed attacks that are extremely difficult to defend against.
Alex Turner argues that autonomous weapons should require human authorization because removing human judgment eliminates a critical check on authority, and military officials themselves admit they cannot defend against drone swarms domestically. ✦ AI generated
Alex Turner · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 131:49
If you develop fully, you know, fully autonomous militaries, that removes a critical backstop for democracy where you've historically needed, you know, a person who's willing to pull the trigger and many people are not willing to pull arbitrarily many triggers at their fellow countrymen. So I think historically that has put a limit on authoritarian governments... there was a very high ranking military official who recently shared no the US would not be able to defend against an autonomous like against a drone swarm domestically and this is a very hard weapon to defend against. The military I think is very competent in many many ways and if they're saying we don't know how to defend against this, I think that that bodes very poorly for everyone's safety.
verbatim transcript · starts at 131:49
131:51London. He's he loves London and so he will never leave >> and so that I think is the they they they've been in planning for a while now. So Cor moved first, got got settled into the headquarters, etc., etc. So this is not this is longterm checked out for a while. >> Yeah. >> So this has been I think really useful conversation. I hope that people hear
132:17and you know we'll certainly put our clipping agent on the task of making sure that people hear your call to feel the AGI so to speak. you know, take really take uh the transformative power of the technology that they're developing into account as they look around their environments in these frontier companies and think about whether or not what they are seeing is okay or whether you know something maybe
132:43urgently needs to be done about it. Um I think that's really >> Yeah, >> please. >> And they they can I think I think they can go and receive counsel from the AI whistleblower institute. You don't need to decide, I'm going to go whistleblow. You can tell them, I think, under, you know, attorney client privilege, uh, what you're seeing and receive advice on what you should do about it. So I I
133:06would recommend to to anyone who's wondering that they should do that >> in So I I appreciate your example and again I appreciate that shout out and I I hope that that resource um you know is is valuable to people who find themselves in these uh I I have to imagine you know extremely stressful situations in many cases. >> Yeah. >> Um maybe in in closing I know we've
133:31already kept you longer than we booked you. Um tell us what you're doing now. you've, you know, had a little bit of time to decompress. You're starting up some new projects. What's the future for you personally? What, what contribution to this mega challenge do you aim to make uh in your next tour of duty? >> So, I've actually been basically just compressing or staying at a steady state
133:53since since putting putting the post out. Uh, and I've been I've been compressing. I've been working on this uh glove box tool, this AI sandbox tool. I started working on it in May before the giant blow up. Um I received some skepticism then uh about well we can keep using auto mode for now. But you know I think it's time I think it's time we stop messing around with these
134:17unconstrained agents that have just full permissions on our computers especially as alignment researchers. So my hope is to help the field of alignment have a tool that they can use reliably, easily, minimal fuss, uh, and and use responsible practices, you know, firewalled, uh, audit logged inside a virtual machine. That's what I'm working on right now. I'm a visiting engineer at FAR. Um, and I'm enjoying. >> Where are we on that? Can I use it now?
134:47What's the timeline to when I can use it? And if there's any you should build a beta yet. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. So, agent glovebox uh on GitHub. >> Yeah, feel free to try it out. >> Agent agent glovebox on GitHub. >> Uh agent hyphen glovebox. >> Uh agent hyphen glovebox on GitHub. >> Cool. Um >> yeah, I'll be uh we'll be paying for a formal security audit soon. Um, and you
- ·Autonomous weapons remove democracy's critical backstop
- ·Historically limits authoritarian governments from overreach
- ·Humans unwilling to pull unlimited triggers on countrymen
- ·High-ranking military official: US cannot defend against drone swarms
- ·Drone swarms extremely hard to defend against domestically
- ·Military admission: 'we don't know how to defend this'