Boeing's Autonomous Fighter Jet Could Arrive Next Year (engadget.com) 130
Slashdot reader technology_dude writes in response to an Engadget report about Boeing's plans to develop an autonomous fighter jet: In Season 1, Episode 23 of Star Trek, the Enterprise visits two worlds that are at continuous war. The war is ran via computers, and people that are victims in a "hit" report to a facility to be terminated. Kirk tells the world's leaders that there can be no peace if there is no cost to the war. We avoid war because of its cost and ugliness. Remove that and you remove the reason to stop. It looks like we may need the Captain to intervene here on planet earth. We seem hellbent on automating our militaries. The report says Boeing's recently unveiled autonomous fighter jet, called the Boeing Airpower Teaming System, is expected to arrive as soon as 2020. "The aircraft is designed to fly alongside crewed jets during combat, performing early warning tests, intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance," reports Engadget. The company says the jets will cost a "fraction" of a manned fighter.
SkyNet (Score:4, Insightful)
So SkyNet's air force arrives before SkyNet proper....
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Your garage must be crowded.
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x-37 already did a year+ in space all by itself... watch out for falling telephone poles.
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I'm pretty sure it was a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
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The Moon is a very harsh mistress.
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Things people used to fall from to claim worker's comp?
Killer Robots (Score:1)
Call them what they are KILLER ROBOTS!
Re: Killer Robots (Score:1)
Bite my shinny metal ass.
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Call them what they are KILLER ROBOTS!
Please explain how "performing early warning tests, intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance" qualifies them as KILLER ROBOTS.
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They're unmanned fighter jets, didn't you read the scary headline?
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I guess my mistake was in reading TFS.
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Call them what they are KILLER ROBOTS!
Are you trying to make them sound worse or incredibly much cooler?
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PS can we give them awesome-swords as well? What's a killer robot without a sword to pull out at the coolest moment?
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Australian killer robots if you don't mind, still as long as it costs a fraction of the F35 Flying Pig, a sound investment. Although fitting extra gear a waste of money, should just be more a boomerang style drone, if it find a target it rams it and blows up, if it doesn't it returns, if it finds a target and misses, well, try, try, try again.
As an interceptor, you just want it out their fast and kill the psychopath in the enemy fighter, so killer robot or killer human, which is worse in reality. I got to
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Just keep in mind that 7/2 is also a fraction.
Kenny singing (Score:1)
Highway to the...... Auto-Zone
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The Crimean War of 1854 was the first one covered in the media of the time, so that's when people in general had some idea of the ugliness of war. That sort of thing hasn't been around that long.
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The curse of the last century and probably still going on into ours is simple:
Weapon technology evolved faster than any human mind can comprehend, or any human ethics evolved with same speed. The previous Iraq war killed probably 5 million people. But it is downplayed as surgery strikes. And the aftermath probably is about to kill 20 million due to the ISIS crisis which no one dares to tackle.
For reference: WWII is considered to have killed 50 million. Bombing Iraq back into the "middle ages" and having ISI
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Or it could be that your numbers from the Iraq war are off by more an order of magnitude. The Iran-Iraq war had far higher casualty counts and was under two million. For reference, the Mongols kills more people in the region of Iraq than was killed in the entire Iran-Iraq war and the Moguls killed far, far, far more when they conquered most of India. When there were fewer people ways were still found to kill more without advanced weapon technology, but do continue with your narrative, I enjoy fiction as
Yay fiction (Score:2)
In Season 1, Episode 23 of Star Trek, the Enterprise visits two worlds that are at continuous war. The war is ran via computers, and people that are victims in a "hit" report to a facility to be terminated.
That's not how it would ever work. One side would eventually cheat, commit the people who didn't suicide to war, and win.
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Project much? Just because you are a cheater, a thief, or a liar doesn't mean everyone else is a cheater, etc.
Don't be an idiot if you can avoid it. I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about life. Life will find a way, and not in a Jurassic Pork sense. Only robots would be satisfied with such a stupid stalemate.
Mark my words, nukes will be used in war this century if CO2 hits 500+ppm due to environmental damage (aka famine) initiated refugee crises.
Religious wingnuttery is a way more likely cause.
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As soon as one side cheats, the other side has every incentive to use actual nukes.
You'll have a lot less incentive to use nukes when my guys are running around your cities shooting the place up.
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The only less realistic sci-fi trope is inventing indefinite life extension tech, and "wise leaders don't let anybody use it becuz 2 many peepul" and the voting pop is fine with that.
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The ONLY less-realistic scifi trope? Not FTL travel? Or time travel? Or reversing X's polarity? Or aliens that look and function mostly like humans, have mostly-American culture, and speak English? Or there being a colony of billions of humans on other planets? Or the moon/Earth having rockets strapped to it to blast it around space like a starship? Or people being a-ok with the ethical implications of transporters? Or the mighty-whitey trope transplanted to sci-fi, where the WASP space-fairing protagonist
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Yes. Thanks for asking!
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In Season 1, Episode 23 of Star Trek, the Enterprise visits two worlds that are at continuous war. The war is ran via computers, and people that are victims in a "hit" report to a facility to be terminated.
That's not how it would ever work. One side would eventually cheat, commit the people who didn't suicide to war, and win.
I still don't understand how reporting to a facility to be terminated is any better than being blown up directly by a bomb or shot with a rifle or whatever. You're still dead because of war, why would people not see that war had a cost?
I'm clearly missing something.
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I still don't understand how reporting to a facility to be terminated is any better than being blown up directly by a bomb or shot with a rifle or whatever. You're still dead because of war, why would people not see that war had a cost?
Lack of property damage, no suffering from mortal wounds before death, no loss of limbs due to explosions, etc. There are up sides. I stand by my assessment, though. Even if you bred your people to be sheep and lie down, a wolf would eventually stand up.
Endless AI warfare (Score:1)
Endless Sky has an interesting endless autonomous war.
Let just jump to GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR! (Score:2)
What side do you want?
More likely Stealth 2005 (Score:2)
Which for some reason has a 5 IMDB rating.
You could just build fast drones loaded with explosives and aim them at aerial targets or ground targets. Also probably won't turn into the floor wax desert topping the F-35 has.
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Yeah, that's not what we need to worry about (Score:3, Insightful)
What we need to worry about is a future where the rich and powerful don't need us. Where virtually everything is done by a small number of machines and a tiny engineering class who serve the ruling class, much like the merchant class served the aristocracy of old in the Dark Ages.
Right now the rich need us to buy their stuff and they need to balance military and civilian life. Once they've got automated kill bots, custom life extension treatments and robots to make their baubles we're all pretty much worthless to them. History has not been kind to people who aren't needed for anything in particular...
You're missing the point (Score:2)
In the past the wealthy had to maintain military to avoid being overthrown. They then had to maintain a healthy civilian life for the military to shift into when they were at the apex of their careers so that again, they didn't get over thrown. Kill bots and au
Re: You're missing the point (Score:2)
That's a fun fantasy, but given that "the rich"in the west tend to be the most gushing of the bleeding hearts, it is just that; a fantasy. Even if all of the philanthropists, movie stars, professional athletes, and other sundry nouveau riche twats suddenly turned evil and decided they wanted global domination, history shows us that - absent a massive cultural change - their offspring would grow up looking for a cause, and likely turn towards something akin to the communist revolutions of the past, looking
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Automation is an important part of it but there's a huge piece of the puzzle you're missing. Right now, standard macroeconomic theory is that the population needs to constantly grow or else the economy is going to be fucked. So long as the upper class believes this, they're going to be reluctant to cull the population (wouldn't be that hard; if the stores stopped carrying food, few people would know where to obtain it.)
However, once they figure out a way to maintain their standard of living despite a huge d
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Damn filter. Sword of Damocles < Killbots.
Re: Yeah, that's not what we need to worry about (Score:2)
Right now, standard macroeconomic theory is that the population needs to constantly grow or else the economy is going to be fucked.
I've never met a single economist who believed this. I'm sure there are a handful, but calling it "standard" is absurd.
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What we need to worry about is a future where the rich and powerful don't need us. Where virtually everything is done by a small number of machines and a tiny engineering class who serve the ruling class, much like the merchant class served the aristocracy of old in the Dark Ages. .
At that point the rich and powerful need to worry about us. The Dark ages which were largely feudal, this means a king didn't wield absolute power, he had lords swear fealty who had lesser nobles swearing fealty to them It was effectively a pyramid scheme. So many kings of Europe were usurped by their own lords. Power and wealth were distributed, of course there was a huge divide between rich and poor, but it was pretty well distributed. National governance like we have now didn't really exist until last ce
What without victims? (Score:2)
The Star Trek example is irrelevant, since when US makes a no US victim war, the other party gets a lot of victims, including many innocents.
Contractor pricing (Score:2)
The company says the jets will cost a "fraction" of a manned fighter.
So... $75M each instead of, say, $85 for the Lockheed F-35. And $70M w/o the undercoating.
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The company says the jets will cost a "fraction" of a manned fighter.
So... $75M each instead of, say, $85 for the Lockheed F-35. And $70M w/o the undercoating.
Or $400M each - a fraction can be greater than 1.
Re: Contractor pricing (Score:2)
It's not just the training; all that life support stuff you have to install, maintain, and lug around also adds significantly to the cost. Get rid of the meat bag and things get a lot cheaper.
Macross Plus (Score:2)
Macross (Score:2)
The real danger with a concert in a Macross future isn't Macross Plus, It's Macross. You could wind up with Lynn Minmei.
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No, but they didn't shy away from the tech even after that. Macross Frontier has the tech re-purposed as exactly what the article describes from Boeing - little fighter wingmen to help out the main jet.
http://mahq.net/mecha/macross/macrossf/aif-7s.htm
Star Wars, Terminator, and War (Score:5, Interesting)
It's clear that the future of traditional war will be air power. Bombers taking off from Missouri, the heartland of the US, were used in the Iraq war. Their is no distance they can't cover with assisted fueling.
Why didn't the ships in Star Wars auto-fly and auto-target/kill?
Spielberg didn't see the future. James Cameron sort of got it with Terminator, except the machines weren't very good shots.
Automated war is terrifying.
From the ground, motion detection and enemy identification from a mile is not out of our reach (I'm sure some our working on this, it's not complicated).
It's this sort of tech that will result in a nuclear exchange (EMP = stop that shit). In my opinion.
How easy is this stuff? Here's an auto-aiming Nerf sentry turrent:
https://newatlas.com/nerf-vulc... [newatlas.com]
What's my point? I don't actually know. But automating war creates more enemies. Not waging war, not so much.
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War between states with armies of automated kill-bots will be like nuclear war - prevented by mutually assured destruction. The problem will be places that don't have armies of kill-bots.
Can't just nuke Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, because nuking is unacceptable and tends to result in nearby nuclear powers responding. But sending kill-bots there... Well we have seen what is done with drones, which are half way to kill-bots. Flown remotely, impersonal and very likely to end up killing a lot of inno
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Why didn't the ships in Star Wars auto-fly and auto-target/kill?
Spielberg didn't see the future. James Cameron sort of got it with Terminator, except the machines weren't very good shots.
Mostly due to prejudice against droids. The Star Wars universe was highly automated. So much that a force of one million men made a difference in a galactic battle. Remember that the combat forces for just one nation in WW2 could ranging in the double digits of millions. The actual number of working humans on the Death Star was probably not near as high as some people suspect with most of the thing just being automated machine. Spielberg saw the future and it was more like Dune or The Culture than Terminato
Cue Top Gun soundtrack (Score:3)
fighter? (Score:2)
it's not a fighter if it performs those tasks, that's not what fighters do
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Fighters are sometimes used for low-altitude recon, if there's a possibility of engagement. Similarly, snipers aren't always sent in to head-shot everyone they can, but to destroy weapons/equipment.
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that's "sometimes" for a fighter... but a craft that 100% of the time doesn't fight doesn't get to be called a fighter
Fighter Jet is an Oxymoron (Score:1)
The stealth fighter doesnt even have afterburners. They should call the F-117A a light bomber, really.
Truth is there really hasnt been any so-called "dog fighting" since the jet engine took over. Whoever sees the enemy first and fires their super sonic air to air missles usually wins.
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there were dog fights until mid 70s, look up the Israeli vs. Arab
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The stealth fighter doesnt even have afterburners. They should call the F-117A a light bomber, really.
The F-117 isn't a fighter. It was just given that designation to confuse the russians.
war DOES have a cost (Score:3)
The given example was poor: there was a huge cost in lives sacrificed willingly.
In the real world there is also a huge cost. Money and lives. Of course, when we have the autonomous weapons, it's foreign lives so they aren't really a loss to us. But what about the money?
When our military costs, combined with the cost of subverting other governments and also the surveillance of our own citizens total more than the military cost of all other countries combined, then we can count that as a significant cost.
If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military. If some of that money was invested in helping our own citizens instead of threatening them with Big Brother, we could empty our jails and many hospital emergency rooms. If we put some money into parental guidance and education and a proactive health care system, we could have a model society.
But then Boeing's profits would drop considerably, and their donations to congresspeople would follow.
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it's foreign lives so they aren't really a loss to us.
Well, it depends on the reason for war. Sometimes, more often than not, you need them to do something for you, or there is significant cost for you if you will have to do something instead of them, and then foreign lives matter too. However if their existence is only a negative for you and are easily substituted ... hello genocide!
If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military.
You will always need a military, but you could shrink the amount of tasks you need it to perform - they are not all necessary, and downsize the standing military, reduce costs. Th
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If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military. If some of that money was invested in helping our own citizens instead of threatening them with Big Brother, we could empty our jails and many hospital emergency rooms. If we put some money into parental guidance and education and a proactive health care system, we could have a model society.
Unfortunately, what you propose doesn't work either. It's been tried.
In the case of helping countries, the big problem you overlook is that the countries that need the most help are the most messed up politically. Poverty tends to go hand in hand with dictatorships. Sure, there are exceptions where dictatorships or single party rule happens in countries that are successfully economically, but if you find a list of the countries that need the most help, you'll see it is in places that don't have fu
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The given example was poor: there was a huge cost in lives sacrificed willingly.
That's true. I can't fathom how anyone would see that as "no cost".
If instead, a similar amount of money were invested in helping countries instead of threatening them, we would be loved and wouldn't need a military.
You can't be that naive. It reminds me of the couple that insisted hate was a false construct and then proceeded to get themselves killed by ISIS.
Humans will always have motivations to covet, attack, and take from other humans, whether you're nice to them or not. We wouldn't be "loved", we'd just as likely be "used".
Every country needs a military. Being nice to people does not stop them from wanting your resources and taking them by force
Don't Be A Chump (Score:3)
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Can we extrapolate this to the future where a dictator can control his own people with no fear of his armed forces deserting him? Yes. Absolutely. But this piece of tech is not that. Not even close.
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This is exactly correct. There is no ethical downside to this. (At the current level of tech).
Reminds me of a story by Robert Sheckley. The Apocalypse has come the devil is attacking. Humanity sends out it's robot legions to fight the devil and eventually defeat him. God arrives, the angels sing, and all the robots are lifted up to heaven.
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Not only are they taking place, we have already trained our young men to control these fighting ships. The tow vehicle, heavily shielded and exquisitely comfortable, will have very high tech gaming chairs to control the machines from. Your last LAN party was basic training for tomorrows war games.
autonomous or lane assist? (Score:2)
sed -i 's/is ran/is run/' (Score:1)
Already Here (Score:2)
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Somewhere i got the impression that the US Navy is already building an automated war ship. i would be shocked if they have not done so.
I would be. At least for one of any size. Until they develop systems that can do damage control, fix what is broken, put out fires, stopper leaks, etc, combat ships will have crews.
A "fraction" of a manned fighter (Score:2)
3/2 is a fraction...
They don't want a reason to stop (Score:2)
They want money. And they only get it if people buy their shit, which they won't do if they don't need a replacement. Of course they want war to continue forever! Its good for the bottom line.