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.
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