Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who is also co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency that is advising President-elect Donald Trump, called out the F-35 stealth fighter on Sunday while endorsing drones over jets piloted by humans.
On his social media platform X, he reposted a video of synchronized drone swarms flying in elaborate formations and added, "Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.
the Defense Department estimates that the F-35 will cost $1.8 trillion, making it the Pentagon’s costliest weapons program.
Going down that path endangers Lockheed Martin’s rice bowl that contains its trillion dollar F-35 weapon system.
But Musk would in the fight of his life to end F 35.
LMT made sure to spread construction costs into as many Congressional districts as possible. Jobs & grease[$] is hard to defeat.
When Musk first got kissy face with an openly, EV-hostile regime, there was the suggestion make here, that he stood to make so much loot off getting the inside track for his other interests, like XAI, on something like a defense contract, that the prospect of Tesla going to zero was trivial.
The big money appears to be in R&D, not actually building anything. As soon as the 35 started volume production, I started hearing calls for the program to be curtailed, and development started on another plane.
Lockheed doesn’t make the avionics. They don’t care if it’s Raytheon, or Collins, or anyone else, making the avionics. They make the bucks “developing” the airframe, and “integrating” the systems. They would be just as happy integrating avionics that paid massive royalties to Musk for using his AI, as anything else. What would need massive AI? A pilotless aircraft. As Tim offered, several times, a lot of systems, and performance limitations, imposed on an aircraft, are there, only to keep that fragile human inside alive. Get rid of the human, and the performance envelope expands, a lot.
Trivia bit: USN carrier arresting gear is limited in the rate it decelerates the aircraft, so the pilot’s eyes don’t pop out of their sockets.
That is what Musk’s AI is for: no need to talk to the person back in the US, driving the video game. The drone is self-contained, like it had a human pilot.
What if the AI makes a mistake? Humans make mistakes too.
What would they need a “Faraday cage” for? SR-71s operated for over 30 years, without one ever being shot down. They had both detection and jamming equipment on board. My interpretation of the above comments was the concern the control link between a pilotless aircraft, and the person driving it, from a ground station in the US, being disrupted. That is not an issue with an AI driven aircraft. It would be as self-contained as a manned aircraft.
