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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.

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[-] PorkrollPosadist@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] DefinitelyNotAPhone@hexbear.net 22 points 1 month ago

Because Lockheed Martin can't upcharge $20 million/unit that way.

[-] SevenSkalls@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago

Not to mention some manager has to justify their existence by bringing in new ideas, and AI is the latest fad to do that.

[-] BobDole@hexbear.net 18 points 1 month ago

I’m pretty sure they already have a database like that. They were tracking maintenance and part life for the last 80 years somehow.

[-] keepcarrot@hexbear.net 3 points 1 month ago

Unfortunately the duty cycle on everything related to the F35 is "eh? Maybe"

[-] jack@hexbear.net 1 points 4 weeks ago

The arms manufacturers withhold key maintenance information to protect their profits

this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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