The thirty-year-old pilot whom I had observed thought that the autonomy “was cool,” but he paddled off even when his plane had the potential to achieve a good offensive angle. “I wanted to basically figure out my limits with the A.I.,” he told Woodruff. “What is too conservative, and what is going to get me killed. And then find that happy medium.”Schnell’s graduate student, who can’t be named because he’s on active duty in the military, came over to listen to the debriefing. “You would be the perfect example of someone we’d need to influence, because—and I do not mean this to be rude at all—you completely violated the construct of the experiment,” he told the pilot. “You were deciding to not let the A.I. do the job that it’s put there to do, even though it was actually performing fine in the sense of not getting you killed. If we want to make you a battle manager in thirty years, we’d need to be able to push that behavior in the opposite direction.”
