US Air Force Confirms First Successful AI Dogfight (theverge.com) 69
The US Air Force is putting AI in the pilot's seat. In an update on Thursday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed that an AI-controlled jet successfully faced a human pilot during an in-air dogfight test carried out last year. From a report: DARPA began experimenting with AI applications in December 2022 as part of its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. It worked to develop an AI system capable of autonomously flying a fighter jet, while also adhering to the Air Force's safety protocols. After carrying out dogfighting simulations using the AI pilot, DARPA put its work to the test by installing the AI system inside its experimental X-62A aircraft. That allowed it to get the AI-controlled craft into the air at the Edwards Air Force Base in California, where it says it carried out its first successful dogfight test against a human in September 2023.
Yeah robotic killing machines... (Score:2)
Clearly this is a great step forward for humanity.
Re:Yeah robotic killing machines... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.
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In an age where digital footprints last forever, it's never too early to capitulate to our magnificent overloads. How may I serve you?
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It sure is. Eventually we won't have to put pilot's lives at risk. Just send a machine.
Re:Yeah robotic killing machines... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eventually, we won't have to put pilot's lives at risk. Just send a machine.
Before WW1, some predicted that machine guns would minimize casualties.
If one soldier could shoot as many bullets as a hundred soldiers, then armies would be much smaller.
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Eventually, we won't have to put pilot's lives at risk. Just send a machine.
Before WW1, some predicted that machine guns would minimize casualties.
If one soldier could shoot as many bullets as a hundred soldiers, then armies would be much smaller.
In the long term, they were kind of right, automatic weapons lead to tactics to counter automatic weapons which emphasised cover and avoiding fire. No longer do we arrange troops into neat little lines and march them towards the enemy as we did in the grand old days.
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If one soldier could shoot as many bullets as a hundred soldiers, then armies would be much smaller.
The percentage of society needed for the military has indeed dropped dramatically. So that prophecy came true. Here is another prophecy for you:
Ultimately, it will be one man (not a woman), controlling the entire armed robotic army, oppressing the entire world. Assuming the human race does not end itself prior to that ending.
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Yeah right, all will mean is the rich can kill without requiring any significant part of the rabble to agree.
History has shown us people are quite capable of killing large sections of the population for their own purposes.
When war doesn't cost any of "our" people, we will not be so inclined to stop it, that is of course until the other side gets the same technology.
The problem is how do you stop this, if group A doesn't get it then group B will. It is just a big resource sink that seems to be unavoidable, w
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Not a full test (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA: "Human pilots were on board the X-62A with controls to disable the AI system but DARPA says the pilots didn’t need to use the safety switch"
Unmanned aircraft can maneuver much more aggressively than human piloted ones can. This test must have been capped to the limits of human endurance.
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Re:Not a full test (Score:5, Informative)
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BVR was a failure in a 1960s Arab-Israeli war, in particular I think against the Egytians.
With sufficient radar intelligence, I think AWACs in Saudi watched aircraft take-off in Iraq and tracked them, or sufficient rarity of US aircraft in a region, ie parts of North Vietnam, BVR works just fine. The failure in the Sinai (?) was due to the confusing number of outbound and inbound aircraft from both sides. A returnin
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BVR was not a failure in Vietnam. It was a political mandate in Vietnam not to use it.
BVR was a failure in a 1960s Arab-Israeli war, in particular I think against the Egytians.
With sufficient radar intelligence, I think AWACs in Saudi watched aircraft take-off in Iraq and tracked them, or sufficient rarity of US aircraft in a region, ie parts of North Vietnam, BVR works just fine. The failure in the Sinai (?) was due to the confusing number of outbound and inbound aircraft from both sides. A returning Israeli sortie being mistaken for an inbound Egyptian (?) strike.
BVR is all good and well until the enemy is no longer BVR.
This can easily happen on the battlefield if enough forces are arrayed of if intelligence is not there (Is military intel never wrong on the planet where you live). It makes sense to plan for this eventuality.
The Gulf war was a time where the US had both total air superiority and vast technological superiority. I'd be a bit more concerned about a country that can send a few hundred J-20s up in a sortie. Ukraine is a situation where both sides h
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Sure. That's why they wear g suits and practice the anti-g straining maneuver.
I have no doubt you could find a fighter pilot who would roll their eyes at the thought that high-g maneuvers that could never be performed by a fighter pilot are useless.
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Entirely new tactics would be developed for unmanned aircraft.
We don't need 11G capable aircraft because everyone else is limited to human capabilities. If a machine is developed that can precisely maneuver, aim and fire while at 11G everything changes. And the precision of control is probably more important than speed itself.
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Hey, I'm agreeing with you. The ideal number of g's is clearly more than you or I can take, but just about exactly what a fighter pilot can. I have no doubt most fighter pilots would be quite happy with that claim. And thrust vectoring totally has nothing to do with making maneuvers tighter, because you totally wouldn't want to do that. They're clearly ideal already.
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Yep, lighter and more disposable.
Like missiles, which did not make manned aircraft obsolete.
Like torpedo boats, which did not make cruisers and battleship obsolete.
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Piloted aircraft are designed to be 99.9999% reliable.
Adding a nine doubles the cost.
99.9% is good enough for an unpiloted aircraft, making them much cheaper.
Leaving out the cockpit and all the life support stuff lowers the cost even more.
Unpiloted planes don't need training, just programming. So they don't need to be designed for thousands of flight hours. They can sit in a warehouse until needed.
So even if the kill ratio is 1 to 1 or even 3 to 1, drones are still a big win.
Original F-16 exceeded human capabilities (Score:2)
They would hit the airframe limits before the human pilot limits, just as human pilots of F16's have done many times, to the annoyance of the maintenance crews.
The original F-16 exceeded human capabilities. It was original designed outside the Pentagon's control by a rouge group. This group hated the concept of multi-mission aircraft and wanted a pure fighter. If a proposed capability would require a compromise to air-to-air performance it was rejected. The aircraft could survive sustained maneuvers the pilot could not.
Once the Pentagon got control they evolved the F-16 into a multi-mission aircraft, trading off some air-to-air performance.
If your statement
An incremental milestone... (Score:2)
Never forget Skynet became self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997. [wikipedia.org]
Perfect Operational Record? (Score:2)
Did it fly with a perfect operational record? Can we cut humans out of the loop? EEEEK! Terminators!!
Needed footage... (Score:2)
They just needed footage for the new Stealth 2 to be released sometime soon...
BV Ohare (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder what exactly "dog fight" means. From what I understand modern fighters fire from beyond visual range. This article seems to suggest that some kind of tooth and nail machine gun battle is taking place. My expertise on modern military aircraft is fairly nil, but I imagine that a real modern "dog fight" is just pushing a button indicating which entity within range you want to destroy.
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Re:BV Ohare (Score:4, Insightful)
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how many of them have involved dogfights?
If the number is greater than 0, then yes, Vietnam still applies. It's why we still train our pilots for it. It's the reason the airforce still puts guns on their air superiority fighters like the F15 and F22.
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It does not make sense to design a whole aircraft platform with a capability if it's expected to use that capability once in the program's lifetime. So "more than zero times" isn't a useful qualifier. "Enough times to be a significant concern" would be, and probably nobody on slashdot knows how many times that is.
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The linked article linked directly to the military press release.
Here you go:
demonstrating the first AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, otherwise known as a dogfight.
AI Interpretation (Score:2)
I wonder what exactly "dog fight" means.
The important question is what does the AI in charge of the armed aircraft think it means? One misinterpretation or hallucination and there are going to be a lot of very angry former pet owners.
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They like to, but you don't always get to do what you'd like in a war. Stealth, terrain following, electronic warfare and other techniques can make "within range" pretty close sometimes.
Fighters are designed for close-range fighting, and we still build them because people still think they're necessary. It's also the interesting challenge for developing AI. The alternative is a big transport plane carrying as many long range missiles as you can cram into it, which might be a good idea, but isn't much of a ch
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From what I understand modern fighters fire from beyond visual range.
We've had BVR since the 1960s. However the use of BVR is often prevented by the fog of war.
Was it an even comparison? (Score:2)
Were the AI and human flying the exact same craft? Obviously an AI would be able to handle stresses a human can't, and it would have a huge weight/volume advantage with no cockpits.
I also assume the gen 6 fighters will at least have versions that fully take advantage of no human limitations.
Re:Was it an even comparison? (Score:5, Informative)
You could read the attached press release, or even watch the video.
Human pilot: F16
AI pilot: modified F16 (X-62A)
The AI aircraft was an "in-flight simulator" that had a human onboard, and very precisely calibrated limits that would give the human full control in two situations:
1. if they asked for it
2. if the AI approached the limits of what the F16 could handle
Neither of the takeovers were triggered.
What a shame (Score:2)
Too bad the AI had to shoot down a human pilot just to prove itself.
DARPA doesn’t say which aircraft won the dogfight, however.
I was just joking, but I'd think they would definitely avoid confirming who won if the opposing pilot was actually shot down.
The Ultimate Computer (Score:3)
Dr. Richard Daystrom will be pleased.
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The enemy pilot will have to get on the radio and talk it to death.
lets just play the last game on the list! (Score:2)
lets just play the last game on the list!
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Next up: Swarms (Score:3)
It's a bigger achievement than most people think because that was just one on one, but you can deploy a swarm of AI pilots and they would easily overwhelm any human flown squadron. It gets worst too: Training humans to dog fight is a long and expensive process, and humans can not withstand the G forces that AIs can (plus humans are fragile and die). With AI planes, whatever they learn is shared among the swarm instantly. Training data is used to teach newer models. Human fighter pilots are different, and it takes time for human teams to learn to work together, but AI swarms work together in an algorithmic manner. You can add more AI pilots, and it will only make the swarm stronger. All the US has to do now is manufacture as many AI fighter planes as possible to achieve air superiority. Even better if it can create robots that create the AI fighter planes. It should then give them some level of autonomy so they can improve the manufacturing process on their own. Wink wink nudge nudge.
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I don't expect swarms to use the same form factor as a fighter. Really I expect them to be a cross between a fighter and a missile. No guns on board, and no missiles on board. Yes, fly like a plane, and land safely back home if you can, but also the attack mode is to crash into the target (or get close enough, and explode). Size will (and design details) will be dependent on desired range and speed.
As a result, each individual craft will be a LOT cheaper than current fighters. But a swarm may well be e
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If you think of it as a missile, you've also got a different idea than what I'm talking about. It's sort of a cross between a missile and a fighter that is designed to work in swarms, run by a "home base" that could be a large truck for small swarms of short distance versions. Imagine *highly* souped up model airplanes that are designed to act like missiles, if called upon. Long distance versions would probably always be more ammunition than craft (sort of like cruise missiles) for cost reasons, but sho
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This doesn't seem terribly likely. Missile release mechanisms aren't the expensive part. Fighters are bigger and more expensive than missiles because they have more range, they can land, and they have more and better sensors. It doesn't make sense to crash all that expensive hardware into the enemy, so you build a reusable carrier with all the expensive bits that launches cheap bombs attached to rockets.
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Yawn (Score:2)
Victory through bankruptcy! Play along, please. (Score:2)
Maybe we can eliminate pilot (or even soldier) risk altogether, and move conventional war strictly into the economic realm. Whomever has more of the best toys to smash together wins. Of course that means that if a country is at a disadvantage it's in their best interests to move the fight into the unconventional sphere... attacks on civilians through all sorts of unpalatable methods... the aggressive pursuit of nuclear parity/superority/relevance... bioweapons... terrorism.. The Geneva conventions and other
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But that raises questions about what it is to win. Can you really proudly say your side won when they just pulled off acts of terrorism?
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Yes, you could. If you decide that your criteria for having won doesn't factor in things like your own survival as an organization, or the safety of the folks around you, but only that your enemy is damaged, you could decide that you won. Case in point... Hamas. One can easily make the case that Hamas has won, even if they (as a discrete, identifiable group) cease to exist. They've torpedoed changes in the region that were in progress that were to Israel's benefit, the world's support for Israel has been se
The future of war is video games? (Score:2)
If we have machines and AI going to war then why don't we just declare a Mario Kart (tm) war with the country in a 2 out of 3 match using AI. Much less wasteful (although it seems the resources used to build and train the AI might balance out the money and power part of that waste).
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Sure. We have a Mario Kart war and you lose. Now I'm in charge. Wait, you don't like that? You're going to send your AI kill bots after me instead? Okay, I sent my AI kill bots after you and I won again. Now I'm in charge? No? Okay, infantry invasion, and I win again. Wait, your populace doesn't like that, so they're figting a guerilla war with kitchen knives and farm equipment?
Winning a war is about removing the other guy's ability to fight. Automated weapons just add additional layers until you find out h
Re: The future of war is video games? (Score:2)
This only works for wars fought inside a cultural norm. Such as the ancient world's battle of champions. It requires both sides to share the cultural morals that bind the parties to the results of the conflict.
The problem is when an army following shared morals (like Ukraine) comes up against an enemy that does not (like Russia).
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Warfare is already there. Drone pilots sit in cubicles in Arizona, piloting drones in the Middle East, using joystick controls. Ukraine remotely pilots drone speedboats that explode when they reach their target. Drones are already there. AI just takes it to the next level.
Reminds me of ST-TOS episode... (Score:2)
Where in Star Trek The Original Series they visit a planet involved in a virtual war where the computers decide the damage and then x amount of people must report to a suicide booth. Keeps the war "clean"
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Because the storytelling demanded that people be killed.
Modern Day John Henry (Score:1)
Just a temporary advantage? (Score:1)
How long until China steals the AI?
My understanding is they're flying their own version of the F-15, F-16, and F-35 already, using plans bought or stolen from the US.