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ML Mike LeBlanc On Conversations with Coleman

“I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. A robot doesn't have that. When I'm going in to clear a building, I'm thinking, I need to come out of this alive. That's job number one. … A robot's the opposite. You want to make sure that you don't shoot before you're absolutely sure, because otherwise we just lose a robot. It's no big deal.”

Conversations with Coleman · Ideas & Essays · November 2026

“I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. A robot doesn't have that. When I'm going in to clear a building, I'm thinking, I need to come out of this alive. That's job number one. … A robot's the opposite. You want to make sure that you don't shoot before you're absolutely sure, because otherwise we just lose a robot. It's no big deal.” — Mike LeBlanc, Conversations with Coleman

Context

Coleman Hughes pressed Mike LeBlanc, a veteran who builds humanoid robots with military uses, on who is responsible when a robot makes a life-or-death call. LeBlanc argues a robot lacks the self-preservation instinct that pushes a scared soldier to shoot first.

Transcript

Conversations with Coleman Around 45:21 into the episode
Mike LeBlanc

…goes on in war ever. And so, you know, the thought that a machine is going to do that worse to me doesn't doesn't really make sense than a 19-year-old that's deprived of sleep, that is, you know, far away from home, scared for his life, right? And willing to do it. Yeah, robots have the benefit of

Coleman Hughes

not being scared for their lives. Yeah, there's really

Mike LeBlanc

interesting asymmetry there, right? Everybody kind of knows the, you know, what is it? I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by six. A robot doesn't have that, right? Where they think, yeah, I just need to shoot these things away from me. It doesn't really matter, right? If a person goes in to clear a house, when I'm going in to clear a building, I'm thinking, I need to come out of this alive. That's job number one. And so you're going to default to, you know, I'm going to shoot every command. Yeah, it looks like a threat. And if there's one that looks like a threat, just to be safe, a robot's the opposite, right? It's go in there. You want to make sure that you don't shoot before, you know, and you're like, I want to be absolutely sure before I do, because otherwise we just lose a robot. It's no, it's no big deal. So I think there are interesting asymmetries, but really none of this is going to come up in a major way because, you know, when it's, when it's World War III and there are 5,000 people dying every day, nobody's going to be going, what did the robot decide to do? And, you know, at what point did it decide to do…

Coleman Hughes

Yeah, well, I'm detecting from everything you're saying, like if I were to describe maybe your worldview, it's like people have these delusional sense of how ordered war is. It's really chaos, it's really hell, and it's always been that way, and it always will be that way by definition. Given that…

Mike LeBlanc

my worldview? We should all be working on diplomacy and trying to avoid the war. This is the key, right? This

Coleman Hughes

was the key. This was the last part I forgot to say, which is given that that's true, we should have fewer wars. Yes, um, and we should only fight wars when we're close to 100% sure that on the same page that is in our interest, because it's going to be ugly by definition, despite all of these…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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