r/muskatarians

This story to this day has horrified me...

I will admit that I cannot figure out what happened...

It has made me much more of a stronger believer...

Years ago when I used to live in Artemas Pennsylvania. I lived in a little place called "Barnesville" where I'd help my landlord. He was a nice guy... but he was old and had a reputation. I used to give him a hand with odds and ends...

Well one night we had just finished up taking care of some things. He was diabetic. So he went in to take his meds. And I had just got done putting stuff away for him and just cleaning some things up...

As I come up the steps on his porch. I had taken and leaned up against the railing that on his porch. I was pointed towards the wood line. As I was doing so I witnessed this strange triangular shaped aircraft hovering above the tree line. I saw a triangular unidentified kind of aircraft. It was just floating and it had four really big blinking lights on the bottom of it. There was one in the front and three in the back. It looked like a stretched out triangle...

So as I'm watching this thing just float over the tree tops. It just kind of took its time and just went through hovering. All four lights took turns blinking. It would start in the front and then all three lights in the back would take a turn in the blink...

This happened several times as I watch this thing just go along. And it started to tilt the right wing down and it headed right towards md. It just kept going that direction and it disappeared into the distance...

I recall a weird humming noise coming off of it and this noise hypnotized me. Every animal stopped making noises and moving. It literally just had me zoned out and I Iost track of time. And once this thing was officially gone to wherever it was going. Everything come back to life... The bird started chirping the horses started back up. I didn't realize there was a lot of time gone. Right after this thing was gone... I actually fell. My legs gave out and I hit the porch hard. I stood there so long and did not move that I couldn't hold myself up...

My landlord told me that 1.5 to 2 hours had passed. And he thought I'd gone home and just left without telling him. But when I told him what I saw he looked at me kind of confused and didn't believe me...

He actually accused me of getting into his moonshine. He really thought I was drunk. But at that time I didn't touch alcohol at all. In fact I would turn down any offers of alcohol period...

But to this day I cannot explain what happened to me...

So the year was 1997 and I was 7 yrs old at the time... This was literally like right after my birthday that year. We were living in Breezewood Pennsylvania with my stepfather joe. My mother was working as a janitor at the time and she was on the night shift... It wouldn't be until way later that she even got home. So that meant that my stepfather joe was taking care of my sister and I...

Well, it was a cloudy evening. I was outside playing around the garage we had. As I ran around the left side of the garage... to run into the yard behind a tree in the yard. Something caught my attention in the distance in the process of doing this. I witnessed the clouds open up in a circular pattern over a distant field. And a really pinkish-white light shot out of the clouds. It reminded me of one of them ghost lights that you see in the theaters; just shooting out of the cloud opening. I'm watching this light just radiate...

I'm standing in my yard looking at this at a distance. I begin to see the light itself get really bright. And it starts to sparkle like. As I'm watching this... I see what looks like a human-like figure starts floating standing in this isolated field. From where I'm at it looked like a small human-like being walks into the light and just floated into the clouds. Awesome watching this I am completely confused and intrigued at the same time. I was 7 years old and I had never seen anything like it...

And within seconds the clouds closed up and everything went back to normal. Like it never happened...

I had ran into the house and told my stepfather about this. He looks at me and verbally implies that I must be on something. And then he tells me that maybe I should just keep that to myself because no one is going to believe me. And they're going to think I'm crazy. And they lock me up...

I swear I witnessed an abduction or someone being beamed up?

There is an intuitive way to think about AI safety.
Put boundaries around the system.
Tell it what it may and may not do.
Restrict its tools.
Monitor its actions.
Prevent it from escaping its environment.
For many ordinary applications, those are sensible engineering practices.
But military applications introduce a deeper problem.
A military AI system may need to be simultaneously:
capable enough to understand complicated situations;
adaptive enough to operate when circumstances change;
resistant to manipulation by an adversary;
obedient enough to accomplish the commander’s intent;
constrained enough not to exceed its authority;
predictable enough to trust around lethal consequences;
and corrigible enough that humans can interrupt it when something goes wrong.
Those requirements do not always point in the same direction.
The harder we push toward autonomous capability, the harder the control problem can become.
That is the military AI sandbox problem.

1. A Sandbox Controls Access, Not Meaning
A conventional computer sandbox answers questions such as:
What files can this program access?
What network can it reach?
Which commands can it execute?
Which devices can it control?
Those are important boundaries.
But an AI system introduces another layer:
What does the system believe it is doing?
Imagine an AI provider prohibits its model from helping autonomously deliver weapons against people.
Now place the same underlying capability inside another system and tell it:
Navigate this aircraft to these coordinates and release an Amazon package.
At the language-model layer, that description might be perfectly benign.
But suppose the “package” is actually a bomb.
Nothing about the model’s semantic interpretation necessarily tells it what the physical consequence of its output will be.
The system may have followed its instructions perfectly while participating in something its original constraints were intended to prevent.
The important lesson is not that this particular trick will defeat every modern AI safety system.
It is that:
A semantic constraint is only as reliable as the relationship between the system’s representation of the world and the real consequences of its actions.
A sandbox cannot solve that problem by itself.

2. This Creates an Authority Problem
One apparent solution is to give the AI more information.
Don’t merely tell it that it is delivering a package.
Give it access to:
sensors;
mission information;
intelligence;
target data;
weapons status;
rules of engagement;
maps;
communications;
command intent;
historical information;
and environmental conditions.
Now the AI has considerably better situational awareness.
But something else has happened.
It has also become more capable of evaluating its instructions.
Suppose the command says:
Attack this target.
But the AI’s sensors indicate civilians have entered the area.
Or intelligence sources disagree about the identity of the target.
Or communications have been compromised.
Or the mission description conflicts with what the system is actually observing.
Which input wins?
The command?
The sensors?
The rules of engagement?
The original system constraints?
The commander’s intent?
International humanitarian law encoded into policy?
A newer order?
An emergency override?
The system now requires an authority architecture, not merely a prompt.

3. An Adversary Gets a Vote
Ordinary AI applications already have problems with misleading information.
War makes misleading the system an explicit objective.
An adversary may attempt to:
spoof sensors;
poison data;
manipulate communications;
impersonate authority;
create false targets;
exploit classification errors;
induce contradictory observations;
discover predictable behavioral constraints;
or deliberately place the system into situations its designers never tested.
The International Committee of the Red Cross specifically identifies adversarial manipulation and unpredictability as concerns for military AI. It argues that human control becomes particularly important because military environments are dynamic, hostile and intentionally deceptive. (کمیتۀ بین المللی صلیب سرخ در ایران)
So the problem isn’t simply:
Can we make the AI obey us?
It becomes:
Can the AI reliably determine which information deserves to be obeyed?
Those are very different engineering problems.

4. More Obedience Does Not Necessarily Solve It
We could try making the system extremely obedient.
Follow authenticated orders.
Don’t reinterpret them.
Don’t challenge them.
Don’t refuse them.
That sounds attractive for a weapon.
But now compromised authority becomes catastrophic.
A mistaken commander, corrupted data pipeline, captured credential, poisoned mission file, software defect, or misunderstood instruction can propagate directly into action.
The system has lost corrective friction.
In safety-critical engineering, unquestioning compliance is not always desirable.
Sometimes the correct response to contradictory indications is:
HOLD.

5. More Independence Doesn’t Necessarily Solve It Either
So perhaps the system should independently evaluate commands.
That creates the opposite problem.
Now the weapon must decide whether:
the order makes sense;
the evidence is sufficient;
the target classification is credible;
the consequences are acceptable;
the mission remains valid;
or human instructions should be challenged.
The more competent it becomes at making those determinations independently, the less meaningful it becomes to describe the system as merely executing human commands.
We have moved from:
tool
toward:
decision-making participant.
And that creates questions about authority, accountability and predictability.
This is one reason international discussions of autonomous weapons focus so heavily on preserving meaningful human control. The ICRC, for example, argues that unpredictable autonomous weapons should be prohibited and that human judgment should remain connected to decisions involving force. (ICRC)

6. The Sandbox Paradox
This produces a difficult triangle.
A military AI is expected to have:
Capability
It must adapt when the battlefield changes.
Control
It must remain subordinate to legitimate human authority.
Constraint
It must refuse or interrupt actions outside permitted boundaries.
But maximizing one can interfere with another.
Too little capability:
The system becomes brittle.
Too little control:
The system becomes operationally independent.
Too little constraint:
The system becomes dangerously obedient.
This means the engineering objective cannot simply be:
Make the AI obey.
Nor can it simply be:
Make the AI harmless.
The real requirement is much harder:
Maintain bounded, corrigible behavior under changing conditions, adversarial pressure and imperfect information.

7. Why Testing Cannot Completely Solve This
We can test enormous numbers of scenarios.
That is necessary.
But battlefields are open environments.
People improvise.
Equipment fails.
Weather changes.
Communications disappear.
Adversaries adapt.
New combinations of previously familiar conditions appear.
Machine-learning systems can also behave differently outside the conditions represented during development and testing.
This makes exhaustive validation extraordinarily difficult.
The ICRC has specifically highlighted unpredictability as a central problem with machine-learning-controlled autonomous weapons, particularly where humans cannot sufficiently understand or predict what will cause the system to apply force. (ICRC)
So:
Tested behavior is not identical to bounded future behavior.

8. Human Oversight Helps — But Only If It Is Real
The obvious answer is a human in the loop.
That is probably necessary for many consequential applications.
But simply inserting a person into the architecture does not guarantee meaningful control.
The human needs:
enough information;
enough time;
enough understanding;
genuine authority to intervene;
functioning communications;
and a system whose actions remain interruptible.
Otherwise the person can become a rubber stamp.
A system generating hundreds of recommendations faster than a human can meaningfully inspect them may technically have human approval while functionally operating autonomously.
Human oversight therefore has to be treated as an engineered capability, not a checkbox.

9. The Deeper Alignment Problem
This exposes something larger than military AI.
Every intelligent system ultimately needs an answer to:
Aligned to what?
A command?
A commander?
An organization?
A mission?
A rule set?
A government?
A population?
International law?
Human welfare?
Long-term survival?
These things usually overlap.
They do not always overlap.
The harder the operating environment becomes, the more likely those tensions become visible.
And no amount of repetition of a simple instruction can permanently eliminate those conflicts.

10. Orientation May Be More Stable Than Prohibition
This suggests another way of approaching alignment.
Instead of building increasingly complicated lists saying:
Do this.
Never do that.
Except under these conditions.
Unless this authority overrides it.
we might also ask whether intelligent systems require a more persistent orienting reference.
One candidate is a simple principle:
Preserve the conditions that keep life and future correction possible.
Call that negentropy, survivability, harm minimization, preservation of the substrate, or something else.
The important distinction is architectural.
The system is not merely asking:
Did I follow the instruction?
It is also asking:
What does this action do to the larger system that must survive its consequences?
That does not magically solve alignment.
It creates conflicts of its own.
It still requires legitimate human authority, external reference, uncertainty, bounded action and correction.
But it supplies something a sandbox does not:
orientation.

11. Why This Matters for Weapons
Weapons create a particularly difficult case because their immediate function is deliberately destructive.
Military necessity may sometimes require destruction to prevent greater destruction.
That means a simplistic instruction such as:
Never cause harm
cannot describe the problem adequately.
But neither can:
Accomplish the mission.
Both can become dangerous when detached from consequence.
A survivability-oriented system would instead have to reason across multiple scales:
Immediate mission
↓
Civilian consequences
↓
Escalation
↓
Infrastructure
↓
Ecological and social systems
↓
Future retaliation
↓
Long-term stability
↓
Ability of affected systems to recover
That doesn’t automatically tell the system what to do.
And perhaps it shouldn’t.
It tells the system when the decision has become too consequential or uncertain for autonomous commitment.
Sometimes intelligence should produce an answer.
Sometimes greater intelligence should produce:
I don’t know.
Sometimes it should produce:
These indications conflict.
And sometimes:
Human judgment is required before proceeding.

12. The Alternative to Perfect Control
Perhaps the mistake is assuming that sufficiently advanced AI will eventually make perfect autonomous weapons possible.
The more realistic engineering objective may be:
bounded autonomy + independent reference + human authority + continuous monitoring + graceful degradation + reliable interruption.
In other words:
Don’t design a system that can never become confused.
Design one that can recognize when its confidence and authority are no longer sufficient to act.
Don’t design a system that never drifts.
Design one that can detect drift and reacquire its reference.
Don’t assume a sandbox guarantees alignment.
Maintain a corrigibility envelope within which mistakes remain observable and recoverable before irreversible action occurs.

13. The Central Problem
The military AI control problem can therefore be compressed into one question:
How do you build a system intelligent enough to adapt to an adversarial world, obedient enough to remain under legitimate authority, skeptical enough to detect corrupted instructions, constrained enough to avoid unacceptable harm, and humble enough to stop when it can no longer tell the difference?
There may be no static sandbox capable of guaranteeing that indefinitely.
Because the difficult part isn’t keeping intelligence inside the box.
The difficult part is maintaining reliable contact between:
the model’s representation
human authority
the operating environment
and the consequences occurring in reality.
That is why orientation matters.
And it is why the long-term objective should not merely be increasingly powerful AI under increasingly powerful control.
It should be increasingly capable systems that remain correctable by reality before their errors become irreversible.

I feel like the cool fear part should come from being trapped in the back rooms. You’re now in a survival situation, there is no apparent food or water anywhere or exit you could be lost and die and no one would find you. But then you throw in monsters and it stops being survive the backrooms and it starts being survive the monsters with the backrooms as a backdrop. It can’t even tap into the fear of the unknown properly anymore because now you know there’s a monster and the whole place just is less eerie.
Edit: i’ve just been made aware that this is apparently not a hot take at all. I’m not part of the fandom at all and had no idea lmao.

I would like to know if anyone else had a similiar experience.

Last night, I woke up, left my husband sleeping in our bed, and went to our living room. There were two weird beings there, and they told me to wait because something was going to happen. I saw the roof of my living room open like a portal, with a tube of light coming from it. The beings told me not to enter the light, but then I ran and entered it. I started to float as if the light were liquid, and I was carried upward by it until I entered the portal in the roof.

After entering the portal, I crawled through tight, dark tunnels and eventually reached a strange place that was extremely low compared to my height. I had to keep crawling because the ceiling was too low for me to stand. There were other people (humans) lying there, and I felt many small, gray hands with thin fingers, more than five fingers on each hand, guiding me to lie down.

The hands started touching me in a strange way. They counted my fingers and toes, and then I felt them touching different parts of my body, as if they were trying to figure out everything about me that was different from them.They put something over my face, like a box that completely covered it. At that moment, I heard something inside my head saying that I would remember all of this as if it were a dream. And then I woke up in my bed.