The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/the-rise-of-ai-fighter-pilots

by jbegley • 5 years ago

98 180 5 years ago

a4isms• 5 years ago

News "articles" that speak to the future of the war and spend most of their words describing new, expensive technology that will replace the existing military approach sound an awful lot like pieces planted by public relations firms working for military contractors.

The purpose is to generate the public's appetite for military spending and to prepare the way for aggressive lobbying. pg wrote at length about the value of public relations in "The Submarine:"

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The above does not mean that TFA does not have value. As pg said: "Good PR firms... give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients."

credit_guy7• 5 years ago

The public in the West has been sold the idea that war is outdated for about 75 years. But in about one month from now, the public will wake up to the fact that the this idea is not quite unanimously shared, and in particular Putin does not care for it that much. In which case, the old advice of Teddy Roosevelt still carries some weight: "Speak softly, but carry a big stick".

melling2• 5 years ago

We don’t crank out planes like we used to:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

Removing humans from the cockpit could increase innovation. Make them a fraction of the size and cost without humans

Arubis• 5 years ago

Removing humans from the cockpit frees designers up to do a lot more than save weight. The big restriction with human pilots is a ceiling for how much G you can pull before your precious human cargo blacks out. Silicon has no such restrictions; you can turn as hard as your fuselage will allow.

mc32• 5 years ago

Also endurance. Now you're only limited to hardware endurance and refueling capabilities rather than pilot fatigue --affording much better performance.

pantulis• 5 years ago

Conspiracy hat on: maybe that's what all the UAP craze is about.

nradov16• 5 years ago

In the real world ability to pull more G's is of limited value. It mostly only matters when defending against a missile after all else has failed. Building an airframe strong enough to handle that load incurs a huge weight penalty.

The UCAVs built so far are actually stressed to lower G loads than manned tactical aircraft.

deepnotderp• 5 years ago

Also, imho AI fundamentally changes how machines of war are made. Currently, a machine must be made expensive and sophisticated since a human is inside it, and if it's already expensive, may as well add some more expense to make it a bit better, and a bit more, etc.

By contrast, with AI, the question becomes a matter of performance per dollar. If I can swarm an enemy with hundreds of cheap fighter jets, then it's okay for me to lose half of them.

This is existential to the US imho, since the US generally always has the best equipment period, but at a very high cost.

enkid• 5 years ago

I think that's already happening. Airframes may not be changing that much, but the capabilities those airframes are carrying have changed a lot, and that's probably a lot more important than the vessel itself. Look at the recent efforts for an F-15 to carry an umammed wingman. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/34982/highly-modified-...

onepointsixC8• 5 years ago

For those who had not watched the AlphaDogfight competition, the most remarkable thing was not that the AI beat the Human fighter pilot. The most remarkable thing was the extreme gap in performance between the best AI and second and third place AI's. It wasn't even close. An AI that is marginally worse could still be able to beat a human but will lose consistently over and over against a better AI.

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race. As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute while their adversaries have no such qualms.

onion2k• 5 years ago

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race.

Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing.

A nation could develop world-class AI planes and they'd be absolutely useless against a hypersonic missile fired from mainland China or a Russian submarine, nor would they be any use against a guerilla army in Afghanistan or Iraq that doesn't have the capability to fight in the air or that has 30 year old planes that can be shot down with 50 year old tech. War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time.

gloriana• 5 years ago

This is true. But the barrier to using over-the-horizon weapons like icbm / hypersonic is much greater than say drone attacks or fighter jet bombs. Have over-the-horizon weapons ever been used? No. But drone attacks and fighter jet activities are daily occurrences because they can be used with little repercussions.

fnord77• 5 years ago

A nation could develop world-class AI planes...

such a nation would probably already have nuclear weapons. Any nation capable of hypersonic skip glide weapons also probably has nukes. So this hypothetical attack wouldn't be happening. At least w/ non-nuclear weapons.

atlasunshrugged2• 5 years ago

Can you extrapolate on this? In my understanding in recent conflicts (e.g. Armenia and Azerbaijan) and currently in Ethiopia, drones (okay, we're not talking about fighter jets here but still, autonomous or near autonomous aerial systems) have played critical roles in eliminating air defenses, heavy weaponry, etc. and in future conflicts now that parties on all sides know how important the use of such drones are, will be deploying their own drones as countermeasures.

onepointsixC8• 5 years ago

I think you're taking the example of dogfighting a little too literal when it can be easily applicable in all sorts of different ways.

Let's take your Hypersonic missiles. The largest difficulty with intercepting such weapons is not their speed, they travel slower than traditional ballistic missiles, but their terminal maneuvering which tries to dodge any interceptors. AI powered interceptors could be a game changer in improving the likelihood of those extremely expensive and limited quantity stand off weapons from reaching their intended targets. And having a slight edge in your interceptor AI vs say the terminal guidance AI could produce overwhelming advantages.

War has changed; making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time.

This has been declared a great many times and yet has been also disproven just as many. Just because a M1A1 Abrams tanks and F-117 Nighthawks Stealth Bombers wouldn't have won the Vietnam War doesn't mean they weren't a significant contributors to winning the Gulf War.

For better or worse airpower will continue to be the deliver method of most warheads onto foreheads. The hypersonic's which you suggest that are making them obsolete are very costly and very limited in total payload capacity compared to the amount which can be delivered by air. There's a reason why Russian and China are not discontinuing investments into new fighter jets and bomber programs just because they have hypersonics.

throwaway8943453• 5 years ago

Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing.

AI would dramatically reduce the cost of planes and it would eliminate the cost of pilots altogether. If you don't need a pilot then the economics of building planes completely change--you can throw lots of cheaper planes at the enemy and accept that a certain number of them won't come back.

I think that will also change the psychology of AI sorties. If a cheap Russian drone downs a cheap US drone, it will probably feel more like "Russians believed to be behind US government hack" than "Russians shot down a US fighter plane". The latter is a lot more of a casus belli than the former.

1980phipsi2• 5 years ago

You would need sufficient hypersonic missiles to knock out the offensive capability of the target.

tablespoon3• 5 years ago

Not really. The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero. The cost of planes, and pilots, is so high that almost all the effort spent these days is on killing your enemy with over-the-horizon weapons fired from hundreds of miles away. AI-powered dogfighting in aircraft is military marketing.

People have been claiming that over-the-horizon missiles will obsolete dog-fighting since before the Vietnam war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_F6D_Missileer

Through the later part of the 1950s and into the 1960s, military air planners increasingly believed that future air combat would be carried out almost entirely by long-range missile fire. This changed the basic requirements for a fighter design considerably. The pilots would be expected to fight primarily through their radar and fire control systems, hopefully never even seeing their opponent. Because of this, the emphasis was on "head down" combat and an all-round view was considered unimportant....

Not saying that won't eventually be true, but it doesn't mean it will be true any time soon. The lesson is to preserve the capability until it's actually been proven to no longer be needed.

credit_guy7• 5 years ago

The chance of any sort of aerial dogfighting happening in a war are next to zero.

I am not so sure. Fundamentally, bullets are cheaper than missiles. A single AIM-9X Sidewinder missile comes at $400k, about the price of a brand new Cessna. A fixed wing drone under $100k is not inconceivable (drones don't have to support pilots, so all sorts of failure modes are acceptable, as opposed to what's ok for a Cessna). It would be within the capabilities of many nations' armed forces to send swarms of thousands of such drones. Shooting them down with missiles will be both expensive and impractical. The only realistic way to defend against swarms of cheap drones is to use your own cheap(ish) drones that can out-dogfigth them.

sandworm1018• 5 years ago

> making better versions of old weapons is a waste of time.

Except for hypersonics being a basic step up for ballistic missile tech, a better warhead/payload atop a rather standard missile. Those submarines are incremental improvements on very old sub designs. Drones have been around for decades too. Even autonomous "suicide drones", but we used to call those cruise missiles with loiter capacity. Despite the constant rhetoric there is actually very little revolutionary in the modern battlespace.

XorNot6• 5 years ago

There are no hypersonic air-to-air weapons, and they're not even being considered.

Hypersonic missiles are only useful against ground-based, slow moving targets. They also look indistinguishable to strategic ballistic missile launches, and cost about the same.

They get a lot of US military "give us funding" excitement, but China's various "anti-aircraft carrier" weapons are almost completely useless in war time because they look exactly like launching a nuke and you can't know in advance they're not.

sAbakumoff2• 5 years ago

> As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute while their adversaries have no such qualms.

Wait, what? Are you saying that if a scientist refuses to contribute to AI development that will be used to kill human beings then he plays into the hands of nation's adversaries ?

CalRobert2• 5 years ago

Not to put words in their mouth but isn't that pretty clear? If you don't develop advanced weaponry, you are going to be killed by people who _do_ develop advanced weaponry.

Unless you manage to stop the advanced weaponry from being developed at all, which is admirable, but incredibly difficult, and with huge consequences for being wrong.

Victerius• 5 years ago

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

onepointsixC8• 5 years ago

Consider for a moment that you believe that Nuclear weapons are abominations which should be all eliminated.

How do you convince North Korea to eliminate theirs? If you eliminate your nuclear weapons, you now open yourself to being threatened with nuclear destruction by North Korea with no mutual assured destructive response to deter them.

The genie is out of the bottle and you cannot stop it. But you can deter its use against you.

belter2• 5 years ago

Nothing a proper EMP weapon will not sort out.

https://www.doh.wa.gov/portals/1/documents/pubs/320-090_elec...

CodeGlitch3• 5 years ago

From your link:

There are two basic ways to protect or harden items against EMP effects. The first method is metallic shielding. Shields are made of a continuous piece of metal such as steel or copper. A metal enclosure generally does not fully shield the interior because of the small holes that are likely to exist. Therefore, this type of shielding often contains additional elements to create the barrier. Commonly, only a fraction of a millimeter of a metal is needed to supply adequate protection. This shield must completely surround the item to be hardened.
The second method, tailored hardening, is a more cost-effective way of hardening. In this method, only the most vulnerable elements and circuits are redesigned to be more rugged. The more rugged elements will be able to withstand much higher currents. This method has shown unpredictable failures in testing, though it is thought it may be useful to make existing systems less vulnerable.

Seems reasonable to provide EMP shielding to a drone?

oneoff7864• 5 years ago

Do we actually have non nuclear emp weapons

scandox• 5 years ago

Arthur C Clarke has a good story on the dangers of warfare at the bleeding edge

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)

beerandt• 5 years ago

Just as advances in war tech in the past have led to the more "advanced" war machine "fighting the last war," these advances only serve to change the behaviors, rules, and context of any future engagement.

Keeping in mind that war is ultimately a "battle" of resources and expenditures, no one in a position of great disadvantage will invest in that particular effort, but seek a way to circumvent it. Whereas the "winner" has already sunk that cost. (Even without AI, how common are dogfights or air-to-air confrontation in the last 50 years?)

There are ways for the more advanced participant to defeat this game, but so far it has required violating human norms that are held sacrosanct even in war.

AI's advantage might end up being the ability to navigate this evolving game theory, but only if it's able to properly value what's acceptable to human nature and what isn't.

A "kill all humans as a solution to end spam" doesn't work here (unless the AI has taken ultimate charge, which becomes an entirely different issue).

On the other hand, certain near-peer potential adversaries have signaled a willingness to violate whatever norms need be violated to secure victory.

minimuffins• 5 years ago

As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute

Sickening pro robo war jingoism!

torginus• 5 years ago

I remember I read a fighter pilot's analysis on the events:

- Bullet drop and travel time were not modelled, the guns were literally lasers

- Most of the kills the AI did were high aspect shots, meaning the aircraft flew perpendicularly to each other. In real life, these shots are almost impossible to hit, due to the aforementioned ignored factors

- A human pilot in a simulator doesn't have the situational awareness of flying in a physical plane

KineticLensman2• 5 years ago

Yes.

> The pilot, dressed in an olive-green flight suit, sat in a high-backed gaming chair, his face obscured by a virtual-reality headset.

So nothing like the real cockpit they would have trained in, with low-resolution, high-latency visuals. This alone could have removed a lot of the expert advantage of a real pilot in a real plane.

imtringued6• 5 years ago

I could say the same thing about lots of obvious economic policies... The world doesn't work like that.

jancsika• 5 years ago

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race. As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute while their adversaries have no such qualms.

Curious how you think such an arms race avoids complete annihilation of both sides.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

There is a great course by Prof. William Spaniel about Game Theory in the context of Nuclear Proliferation. Highly recommend it for anyone who wants to know about the nuts and bolts of how nuclear policy is shaped: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKI1h_nAkaQqivWh2_XEt...

Basically, you have to choose between MAD or asymmetrical destruction. With exponentially improving AI, the situation is more like an inverted pendulum. Any small perturbation (say resources or breakthroughs in AI) would lead to catastrophic asymmetrical advantage for one side.

oneoff7864• 5 years ago

That doesn’t make much sense.

You’re implying that because this AI beat another AI by a lot that all skill gaps between AI must be significant. What if the second and third place versions just weren’t as good and over a relatively short term it all converges?

XorNot6• 5 years ago

This is an extremified version of the general progress of technology in warfighting though: while we have the stories of automotive factories being converted to produce tanks during World War 2, that was something that was only possible in the environment of the time.

More then ever, you go to war with the military you have, the outcome is going to be decided very quickly because the rate of equipment attrition is enormous: military victory will be decided in weeks, not years (you can of course still lose the occupation, but that's a different matter).

stubish• 5 years ago

An AI system will consistently beat an opposing AI system if it has been trained to beat the opposing AI system, as it will only engage if it can predict a favorable outcome. Fully autonomous systems are going to have to be very, very secret because one leak will destroy their utility. This alone might be a good reason to keep them as pilot assist systems rather than pilot replacement.

Gortal278• 5 years ago

As well as any nation who's best and brightest minds refuse to contribute while their adversaries have no such qualms.

I am worried about this somewhat. I know a few too many great engineers reluctant to work on defense work because they are concerned about what their friends will think. It's not particularly tasteful in progressive circles.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Those fucking defense companies can start paying more and maybe I’ll consider building weapons to be sold to the Saudis.

dehrmann• 5 years ago

This bodes very poorly for any nation that falls behind in the AI race.

How much do flight characteristics matter? A better AI might still lose in a worse plane.

dmead2• 5 years ago

Do you guys remember in the digg days when somebody was outed as a literal pentagon employee who would post over and over about the latest military hardware?

I wish i could find some evidence of this. I just have my memories about it.

bigodbiel• 5 years ago

There certainly are, the problem is the burden of proof. One case in particular was the USS Nimitz UAP video. It first leaked on the conspiracy Above Top Secret forum in 2009 (iirc); the now disclosed video, comms transcript,m. Obviously no one believed (and this being a conspiracy forum!), not that OP behavior helped with credibility. But still interesting to have such vindicated after all these years.

dmead2• 5 years ago

That's got very little to do with what I'm talking about

The incident I'm talking about was activity duty army officers being paid by the pentagon to do propoganda work in the early social media years.

They would post pictures and video (in broad daylight) of the latest weapons or jets and something with tag lines like "these guys are doing a great job!". The user was later outed as coming from the pentagon or some base in the northeast.

I don't know what the ufo videos have to do with what I'm talking about.

The implication here is that the times article is also just a work of propaganda that tries to justify the absurd amounts of money being pumped into defense.

hirundo2• 5 years ago

It doesn't seem to me that aerial combat is vastly simpler than ground combat. If a robot pilot can accurately identify friend and foe, and maneuver effectively to target the latter, then likely we are not a lot farther from doing the same with an infantry robot.

nindalf• 5 years ago

How do you identify civilians on the ground? Are they as easily identifiable at a glance like objects in the air? Do they all carry transponders to identify themselves wirelessly?

We’re certainly far away from effective solutions for either but one problem is much easier to solve.

baybal24• 5 years ago

Civilians are not identified, and every army today in an active conflict disregard Geneva convention.

cjbgkagh• 5 years ago

“Anyone who runs, is a VC. Anyone who stands still, is a well-disciplined VC!”

buscoquadnary• 5 years ago

Moving through the air is a lot easier than moving on ground. No mud, slopes, or rubble to deal with.

jetbooster• 5 years ago

I would claim it is vastly simpler. going from one position to another in a aerial vehicle is much simpler than navigating a cityscape, a swamp, or even simply an uneven field.

In the aerial domain, your environment is for all intents and purposes empty, and you operate over and above a surface which may have targets on it. As long as you ensure your manuevers don't intersect the ground manuevering is mostly point in the direction you want to go. aerial -> aerial is even simpler, as these engagements are long range and often significantly above the ground, so other than maintaining altitude you can treat the whole universe as empty except you and your target.

hirundo2• 5 years ago

There are numerous videos of robots traversing rough ground now. None of them can approximate a human athlete doing the same, yet. But I remember when the same was true of the best chess programs versus humans, and now the one on my phone can beat an international grand master.

boppo12• 5 years ago

I wonder how this (and drone tech) affects helicopter pilots. I briefly considered enlisting to try and be an army helicopter pilot, but the contract is a 12 year obligation. I just couldn't get over the thought that 5 years from now, AI and drone based countermeasures will be like nothing we've ever seen. I don't trust the army to figure that one out before losing a bunch of people.

imtringued6• 5 years ago

Artillery is still relevant after decades of being declared obsolete.

1980phipsi2• 5 years ago

I would imagine that these AI fighter pilots may still need a human being so that they don't shoot done civilian planes or something. How good are state of the art drones at flying in inclement weather with poor communication to home base?

imtringued6• 5 years ago

Absolutely terrible?

CodeGlitch3• 5 years ago

Civilian planes fly with transponders - something that you can receive with a $20 bit of hardware. Military aircraft do not turn their transponders on unless they want the world to know where they are.

mLuby3• 5 years ago

Not all civilian planes do this, nor other airborne objects like skydivers.

dkobia• 5 years ago

I am reminded of the very awesome book Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez -- A fictional account of a future with A.I. fighter pilots with permission to kill.

dirtyid5• 5 years ago

IMO ramifications of AI fighters pilots would be more clear if writings focused on superhuman abilities to evade, which obliviates much of modern warfare underpinnings.

Superior mental performance + kinematic performance in purpose built drones that operate at highers Gs = shifting force balance towards offense since when measures becomes obsolete / unworkable. Anti air weapons work well when autonomous missile can arbitrage the performance limitations of meatbags. But without meatbags, the sweet spot performance envelope are a step up - fighter sized vehicles that can carry more sensors, more compute, larger engines and more fuel than smaller vehicles like missiles. It's dodging in bullettime made real.

Carriers can rationalize their existence currently because entire carrier group + air wings has enough countermeasures to defend against saturation attack from (for optimistic demonstration) 100 incoming fighters and their missiles. This limits threat to other large states. But if AI can evade most of the counter measures that you only need 10 drones to penetrate a carrier group bubble, and considering these are unmanned that can be sold to almost any country without need to sustain complex airforce institutions, then the entire notion of modern naval power from a few capable projection platform dies. Global security balance is going to be decided even more by local superiority when significant force projection from around the world becomes untenable.

nradov16• 5 years ago

That's not how it works in the real world. Evading missiles, or avoiding being shot at in the first place, is more about tactics, signature management, EW, situational awareness, and defensive systems. The performance limitations of the "meatbags" are seldom the deciding factor.

dirtyid5• 5 years ago

It is one deciding factor, among the other you listed, which I already highlighted - sensors, compute, engines etc. I'm just pointing out a fighter sized UAV platform with no human limitation, more tech / countermeasures and fuel is going to have dramatically better performance envelope for evading AA, especially missiles with limited deltaV. Which is arguably more significant than dogfighting since dogfighting is a means to an end - destroying some significant ground target. Highly maneuverable UAV platforms that can trivially penetrate air defenses is more scary than AI fighters that can trivially shoot down other fighters, because being good at evasion means they wouldn't even need to dogfight.

neonate• 5 years ago

https://archive.is/ODgL0

sandworm1018• 5 years ago

>A fighter plane equipped with artificial intelligence could eventually execute tighter turns, take greater risks, and get off better shots than human pilots.

No.

(1) An AI-controlled fighter is still limited by the laws of physics. In 99% of circumstances the pilots ability to "pull G" is not the deciding factor in maneuvering. Pulling 10+ is only possible for a wing, ANY wing, in very specific circumstances of speed an air pressure. Most realworld dogfighting occurs well below human G limitations.

(2) Can AI take greater risks? Fighter pilots in combat don't avoid risk out of fear for their own live. That isn't part of their thinking. They avoid risk because the loss of their aircraft will have knock-on impacts to the rest of the operation. Fighter pilots do not protect themselves, they protect a host of other aircraft and people standing behind them. The concept that an AI pilot will press an attack where a human pilot would back off out of fear evidences a lack of understanding. Fighter pilots don't back down for such reasons. Listen to the recordings/transcripts of pilots in dogfights over Vietnam. They are aggressive to a fault, once in an turning fight pressing the attack no matter the likely outcome.

(3) What "better shots" will these AI be taking? Missiles are not arrows. They are autonomous vehicles. Whether an AI or a human pilot launches them is of little consequence to a sidewinder. There is a place (cranking) where an AI pilot might be able to better perform the maneuver and better-guide a missile, but that isn't AI rather than a basic autopilot-type assist (holding target at a particular angle). As for gun shots, AI is no needed to calculate a trajectory and fire the cannot at the appropriate moment to most likely intercept the target. That is well within non-AI tech.

ulnarkressty• 5 years ago

This is what I don't understand about sci-fi shows set up in space - why bother with a pilot? Surely one can see the advantage of not having to waste space and life-support for a squishy meatball. Apparently nobody saw this coming, much like Picard carrying his 5 physical eBooks with him. That or close-up shots of some radiator don't really make for compelling TV.

mLuby3• 5 years ago

Good sci-fi is about humans, bad sci-fi is about technology.

You're right though, no fighter pilots in space and no stealth in space are two lessons the entertainment industry has been slow to learn.

The Expanse (which is amazing—go watch 3 eps) strikes a good balance: pilots work in tandem with ship software the fly; they're more like navigators with AI helmsman. And it looks like gunners are prioritizing targets for the ship's AI to shoot, not swinging the turrets around by hand like Skywalker & Solo in A New Hope.

nirav72• 5 years ago

This is why I've always loved the Expanse series of books and the TV show. AI is there, but its not up front and central. In fact, its never really even mentioned in any of the books. It's just treated as ambient expert system software in the background. It's just there and not discussed.

oneoff7864• 5 years ago

That was my biggest pet peeve with the mandalorian season 1. Star Wars is fairly clear that droids are at or below human level competence, and tend to behave as generally intelligent entities but maybe with some dorky code of laws they must obey.

The mandalorian throws in droids that have machine like precision and just wipe the floor killing dozens of people in a firefight, taking no cover, and missing no shots, 360 no scope dual wielding. It broke a lot of unspoken rules about how the world worked.

akiselev• 5 years ago

The mandalorian throws in droids that have machine like precision and just wipe the floor killing dozens of people in a firefight, taking no cover, and missing no shots, 360 no scope dual wielding. It broke a lot of unspoken rules about how the world worked.

The first IG assassin droid appeared in Empire Strikes Back the movie and was a boss on the train level of the N64 game. In canon, most of the IG series are unique one offs so they're not exactly mass produced droids found all over the galaxy like maintenance drones (with the exception of the IG-86?). They're very high value items that get reprogrammed and passed from organization to organization.

Terry_Roll• 5 years ago

They have come a long way since the AI mine was invented!

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

I wonder if we can just build some relatively cheap drones with video game AI on hardcore level and unleash swarms of them over enemy airspace.

Seattle3503• 5 years ago

One interesting implication of AI warfare is an increase in the tempo of war. Decisions won't happen on human timescales, but some of war and combat is making ethical judgments in the heat of the moment. We will need to make war AI that can evaluate moral dilemmas.

Alternatively we will neglect to program for ethics, and the consequences will be unpleasant.

oneoff7864• 5 years ago

Unlikely in any sort of near term. AI isn’t going to be making strategic decisions for the poorly defined word that is reality. It’s not like StarCraft where you can reduce things to a math problem. There’s all sorts of unique contextual knowledge that makes it impossible for a simple model to understand.

VectorLock7• 5 years ago

Lots of hypotheticals about the capabilities of missiles vs. jets and recently I found this YouTube page thats new that has videos of setting up simulations in Command: Modern Operations with surprisingly accurate (to my untrained eye) simulations for something you can get on Steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXWJ-Px5tU

AlexanderTheGr8• 5 years ago

I am surprised to not see any mention of the book - "Army of None", which is about autonomous weaponry.

A review by Bill Gates: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Army-of-None

foxyv• 5 years ago

The best AI dog fighter in existence is an Aim-9X sidewinder. Short range air to air missiles with helmet cuing systems have gotten to the point it's essentially a see to kill environment. Thrust vectoring, 3D IR mapping, countermeasure rejection, optics, laser fusing. Weapon engagement zones are sometimes measured less than the warhead's effective radius. Absolute insanity.

However, there are some serious advantages to having an AI autopilot for dog-fights. Stuff like failover for G-lock (pilot loses consciousness during maneuver) and jinking to avoid shots makes a great deal of sense. Dogfight assist for gunnery would also be pretty sweet. Something similar to the gun PAC on a warthog maybe where you hold secondary trigger and instead of stabilizing the jet it gets the nose on the lead target indicator.

Another case is when drone fighters are intentionally sent out clean (no missiles) to avoid an incident and enter a merge unexpectedly. Also there could be cases where large numbers of cheap junk fighters are sent against small numbers of expensive fighter drones. Not enough missiles for 5-1 ratios, but guns for the 5th jet may make the difference.

The Rise of A.I. Fighter Pilots

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