Source: New Yorker Science & Technology
The revelation that U.S. military operations against Nicolás Maduro relied on AI-assisted targeting—reportedly through or alongside Project Maven, the Pentagon's algorithmic warfare initiative—moves autonomous decision-making from theoretical debate into documented operational practice. This involves machines narrowing the decision space for lethal action, where human oversight becomes review rather than judgment. The case exposes how "human-in-the-loop" functions in practice: once automation handles detection, tracking, and recommendation, the human operator becomes a bottleneck to be managed, not a safeguard.