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The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

arstechnica.com

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Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#51

Post by mig39 »

scottLobster wrote: post #44
merely-unlikely wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On your point about land mines, antipersonnel variants have actually been banned by the UN for a while now - "Anti-personnel landmines are prohibited under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (or Mine Ban Convention), adopted in 1997."[1] As you say, the ethics debate isn't really new. [1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/co…

Yeah, but I think historically that's going to be an anomaly brought on by the unipolar moment of US/Western military dominance, not a moment of ethical enlightenment. The US and its allies were so dominant that they didn't really need landmines to win anymore, and landmines are one of the cheapest effective deterrents their potential enemies could use. So it became yet another requirement for acceptance into the "ru…

> The US and its allies were so dominant that they didn't really need landmines to win anymore, and landmines are one of the cheapest effective deterrents their potential enemies could use.

If the US doesn't need landmines, why won't the US ban them? The United States is one of the nations that hasn't signed the Ottawa Treaty?

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#52

Post by ianburrell »

kibwen wrote: post #18
josho wrote: post #12

What will be interesting is when we design a fighter that doesn't have to accommodate a person. Its size can likely shrink and its performance envelope can be completely re-thought. E.g. Similar to the move from pets to cattle in computing. A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable and swap safety features for additional payloads. The squadron could first coordinate in a pattern far more sophisticated than…

Yet another reason that the trillions of dollars spent on the F-35 have been wasted.

Trillions haven’t been spent on F-35. Trillions will be spent on maintaining them. But drones cost money to buy and maintain.

F-35 is probably why don’t do drones for a while since will have bought a ton of great fighters that will be good for decades.

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#53

Post by meepmorp »

kibwen wrote: post #18
josho wrote: post #12

What will be interesting is when we design a fighter that doesn't have to accommodate a person. Its size can likely shrink and its performance envelope can be completely re-thought. E.g. Similar to the move from pets to cattle in computing. A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable and swap safety features for additional payloads. The squadron could first coordinate in a pattern far more sophisticated than…

Yet another reason that the trillions of dollars spent on the F-35 have been wasted.

You leave Fat Amy out of this

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#55

Post by LarryMullins »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #6

The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as other nations arm ai enabled drones with anti air missiles. There's no time for 'human in the loop' when the first to act survives. Thus down the slippery slope we go. In 20 years time we'll probably have aircraft that do figure eights over enemy territory for hours before automa…

> The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as

The promise is already a farce because autonomous weapons that sense the environment and make unilateral decisions to kill have already been in use for decades now. From low-tech landmines to high-tech ship-classifying CAPTOR torpedoes which fire themselves, a weapon sensing its surroundings and deciding to kill is nothing new.

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#56

Post by bearmode »

zabzonk wrote: post #32

i am pretty sure we will see self-driving planes (hell, all commercial jets effectively do that) before we see self-driving cars.

Wouldn't doubt it. Far less to crash into when flying a plane. No worries about pedestrians, cyclists. Usually have good visibility, nobody speeding around a corner leaving you no time to react.

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#57

Post by [deleted] »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #6

The military always claims they will have a human 'in the loop' to make kill decisions. That promise will go out the window just as soon as other nations arm ai enabled drones with anti air missiles. There's no time for 'human in the loop' when the first to act survives. Thus down the slippery slope we go. In 20 years time we'll probably have aircraft that do figure eights over enemy territory for hours before automa…

[deleted]

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#58

Post by LarryMullins »

merely-unlikely wrote: post #33
alkonaut wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That promise will go out the window just as soon as other nations arm ai enabled drones with anti air missiles. Ethics don't go out the window because of autonomy. It's dark, but it's not somehow easy to shrug off as "ok no human then no ethics". We already have semi-autonomous weapons such as CIWS (Goalkeeper/Phalanx) which are autonomous because it's very tedious for a human to sit idle and wait for threats and t…

On your point about land mines, antipersonnel variants have actually been banned by the UN for a while now - "Anti-personnel landmines are prohibited under the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction (or Mine Ban Convention), adopted in 1997."[1] As you say, the ethics debate isn't really new. [1] https://www.un.org/disarmament/co…

Neither the US, Russia nor China has signed on with the Ottawa Treaty.

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#59

Post by ianburrell »

scottLobster wrote: post #48
josho wrote: post #12

What will be interesting is when we design a fighter that doesn't have to accommodate a person. Its size can likely shrink and its performance envelope can be completely re-thought. E.g. Similar to the move from pets to cattle in computing. A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable and swap safety features for additional payloads. The squadron could first coordinate in a pattern far more sophisticated than…

I'm thinking it'll be more of a hybrid model, where you'll have a human in a fighter jet with an accompanying drone swarm, where the fighter serves primarily as a missile truck/Command and Control system, with perhaps the potential for direct human intervention in certain scenarios. But I doubt pilots will be dog-fighting or doing their own bombing runs in the near future.

I don’t think it will be swarm since there are size limits for drones to carry useful payload. The US is working on drones that would accompany fighters and provide extra ammo. They would also be useful for simple jobs like loitering and dropping smart bombs that US strategic bombers did a lot in Afghanistan.

I doubt pilots will be dogfighting or doing bombing runs because those aren’t done any more.

Re: The US Air Force successfully tested AI-controlled jet fighter

#60

Post by vel0city »

josho wrote: post #12

What will be interesting is when we design a fighter that doesn't have to accommodate a person. Its size can likely shrink and its performance envelope can be completely re-thought. E.g. Similar to the move from pets to cattle in computing. A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable and swap safety features for additional payloads. The squadron could first coordinate in a pattern far more sophisticated than…

I imagine they'll shrink a bit and look a little different than what we have now. I'm curious what percentage of most fighters space today are human support system versus payload capacity, fuel storage, maneuverability surfaces, engines, control systems, sensors, etc. And I also wonder what percentage of the costs per hour come from the pilot in the seat versus the maintenance of the aircraft and other operating costs.

Carrying enough fuel to go some far distances and back takes up space. Missiles and bombs aren't always small. If you're carrying a lot of payload/fuel weight, you're going to need to have enough surface to generate enough lift, etc. If we're planning on these birds to run similar-ish kinds of activities, I don't know they'll be that radically different. But maybe the missions will be radically different.

> A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable

A jet fighter still usually costs a few million to acquire, before the cost of the pilot even come into the picture. Once again, if they're gonna be built to handle the same mission profiles, I don't know the acquisition cost is going to be radically different. Probably a bit cheaper, but what costs more the seat or the engine? The stick or the hydraulics that actually actuate the wings? I wonder what the real savings are to take the seat and life support out of the plane. Like if you made something like the F-35, but no seat and no life support and no fancy targeting helmet, what's the per-unit cost? Something tells me still probably a few million. It'll be a lot cheaper to lose one in the end not having a human in the seat, don't get me wrong, and I imagine there would be less hesitation to deploy them in riskier deployments since there's no human in the seat, but I don't know I'd use the term disposable to talk about a few million dollar piece of hardware.

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