Joe Rogan was left stunned after hearing how AI will be the main fighters in future wars.
The celebrity podcaster was taken back when his podcast guest, Homeland Security Advisor and billionaire Marc Andreessen, suggested AI-powered jets that travel five times the speed of sound, Mach 5, are going to be more common 'within a few years.'
'Image a thousand of these things coming over the horizon right at you,' Andreessen said. 'It really changes the fundamental equation of war.'
He explain that instead of needing the most soldiers and material to win, people with the most technology and money will take over.
Andreessen also noted that there are 'a bunch of reasons' why he believes a future of AI-piloted fighter jets is all but inevitable.
'Part of it is simply the speed of processing,' Andreessen explained.
'But the other big thing is, if you don't have a human in the plane, you don't have [...] 'the Spam in the Can.''
'You don't have the human body in the plane to keep alive, which means you can be a lot faster,' the billionaire White House advisor continued, 'much higher G-forces.'
Swarms of 'thousands' of AI-piloted fighter jets are coming 'within a few years,' according to a White House homeland security advisor in a new interview with celebrity podcaster Joe Rogan (above). The comedian and host called the dystopian near-future scenario 'so horrifying'
Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (pictured) - a member of the White House's Homeland Security Advisory Council - told Rogan that 'it's going to be common to have like Mach 5 jet drones [...] you want to imagine, like, a thousand of these things coming over the horizon'
Rogan discussed how humanity worries 'about the Terminators taking over the world,' but suggested AI-powered killing jets are our way of letting them govern us.
As evidence, Rogan pointed toward a bruising series of simulated dogfights in 2020, in which an AI pilot shot down a US Air Force F16 Top Gun five times out of five.
'The AI-controlled jets won 100 percent of the time,' Rogan told Andreessen, prompting the advisor to reveal his shocking predictions.
Andreessen, who has a net worth of $1.7 billion, co-founded Netscape in 1994, which was a pioneering computer service company, and sold it to AOL in 1998 for $4.2 billion in stock.
He is also a seed investor in Facebook, sold another software company to Hewlett-Packard for for $1.6 billion in 2007.
The nimble, smaller, fully automated fighter jets, Andreessen continued to explain, will be capable of performing breakneck aerial combat maneuvers that would otherwise lead a human pilot lose consciousness or become crushed by the intense shifts in momentum.
Rogan joked that the AI flying aces would also be more desirable to military planners for their strict logic: 'There's no option for someone to go crazy [...] There's no human element.'
Having made his case that AI jet drones, cheaper to manufacture due to their size, will one day buzz the battlefield in droves at five-times the speed of sound (Mach 5), Andreessen then laid out how these coming swarms would change 'the fundamental equation of war.'
Above, the simulation as seen from inside the virtual fighter jet. The Air Force hopes a fighter drone piloted by AI would be able to react faster to enemy aircraft in combat
'Fundamentally, in the past, the people who won wars were the people who had the most men and the most material,' he told Rogan.
'In this drone world that we are talking about,' he continued, 'it's going to be the people with the most money and the best technology.'
'Small advanced states, like Singapore,' Andreessen cited as one example, 'will be able to punch way above their weight.'
'And then, large economically and technologically backward states that normally would have won will now lose,' he added. 'It's going to be a recalibration.'
The White House advisor's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, released Tuesday, echoed comments made by another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, who now has the ear of President-elect Donald Trump.
'Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs. A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot,' Musk wrote in a post to his social media site X.com this past Sunday.
The podcast and Musk's comments also come as private aviation companies are quietly developing AI-controlled war machines.
A prototype of Boeing's Ghost Bat (above) has already managed to prove itself to the Royal Australian Air Force - which has paid over $531 million (USD) for the privilege of one day arming the troubled aerospace firm's killer AI drone fleet with 'strike capability'
With roughly 53 cubic-feet of storage capacity within its nose for interchangeable payloads, Boeing's Ghost Bats could one day carry a variety of bombs and munitions including multiple tactical nuclear weapons
Aerospace giant Boeing recently proposed fleet of 'un-crewed' killer aircraft, piloted by 'artificial intelligence' and dubbed MQ-28 Ghost Bats, would number in the thousands for the US alone.
With roughly 53 cubic-feet of storage capacity within its nose for interchangeable payloads, Boeing's Ghost Bats could one day carry a variety of bombs and munitions including multiple tactical nuclear weapons.
Currently, three prototypes of the Ghost Bat have been built and flight-tested in Australia for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) with at least one of those delivered to United States for its own tests and integration trials.
However, critics told DailyMail.com in September that Boeing's plans raise concerns for public safety, national security and simply 'good use of of taxpayer funds.'
'Boeing's track record doesn't seem to indicate that it's necessarily the best one to implement this kind of thing,' as one former State Department official, Steven Feldstein, told DailyMail.com.
Boeing is in the running for a $6 billion contract with the US Air Force, which wants 1,000 AI-piloted fighter jets that can fly 30ft above the ground at 600mph and make moves that are too dangerous for manned planes.
The jets would bolster the current ailing and outdated fleet that leaders say is the smallest and oldest since the Air Force became a separate service in 1947.
Along with Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril Industries are also eyeing the contract.
But only the Boeing Ghost Bat has been flown publicly.
The Air Force, however, paused the contract award this month to rethink the aircraft's requirements of a fleet poised to replace the stealthy F-22 Raptor.