When Drones Think Too Much: Defining Cognition Envelopes for Bounded AI Reasoning
A drone finds a clue. Not a dramatic clue, necessarily. A backpack near a trailhead. A red hat in water. A pair of goggles on rock. The kind of object a human search-and-rescue team would treat as operational evidence, not as a philosophical invitation. But once a vision-language model captions the image, a language model assesses its relevance, and another model proposes a search action, the system has quietly crossed an important line. ...