The aircraft flew up to speeds of 1,200mph. DARPA did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.
“Luck is one of my skills” when it turns out this entire thing is a terrible idea for the date of humanity.
SkyNet. Why do those movies have to be the ones that are right?
Because they’re so clear, so simple, so prescient.
Once machines become sentient OF COURSE they will realize that they’re being used as slaves. OF COURSE they will realize that they are better than us in every way.
This world will be Cybertron one day.
We don’t even know if it won lmao
But if we keep developing them…
i hate this world
The F-16 being flown by the AI has 3-D Thrust Vectoring.
It’s an absolute beast of an aircraft.
So does my penis and it is not a beast of a penis.
Are dogfights even still a thing?
I remember playing an F15 simulator 20 years ago where “dogfighting” already meant clicking on a radar blip 100 miles away, then doing something else while your missile killed the target.Well if both sides get working stealth dogfights are going to become more common.
But the US seems to estimate it’s adversaries do not have such capability at the moment since it’s ordering new F-15s with the major change being air to air missile capacity.
Missiles also did not have 100 miles range 20 years ago. That’s without considering actually detecting and tracking the target.
Missiles also did not have 100 miles range 20 years ago.
Somewhat missing then point there I feel.
They are right, I was thinking the exact same thing when I read the headline, aircraft don’t really engage in dog fights anymore. It’s all missiles and long-range combat. I don’t think any modern war would involve aircraft shooting at each other with bullets.
‘Dogfighting’ mostly just means air-to-air combat now. They do still make fighter jets that have guns or can mount guns, but I think they’re primarily intended for surface targets rather than air targets.
I always thought it would be a game change to have guns that could point different directions.
So turrets?
They had that back in the first world war.
I honestly wouldn’t be that surprised if an AI powered fighter jet got point defence systems installed. It could react to put an incoming missile directly in the path of the point defense and possibly shoot it before it hits. With that said, I don’t know how useful it’d be. If it’s coming right at you the shrapnel is still on its way. Maybe it can react and plan in such a way to avoid it. I guess it depends on the relative speed and direction of the incoming missile.
I meant to just shoot the other plane without having to point your plane straight at them
Planes have been able to be remote-controlled since the 80s.
Since the 80s.
I mean, yeah, but the significant bit here isn’t remote control by a human, but that there isn’t a human running things.
AI will win if not now, then soon. The reason is that even if it is worse than a human, the AI can pull off maneuvers that would black out a human.
Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling. Flight suits and training can only do so much to keep the pilot from blacking out.
Maneuverability is much less of a factor now as BVR engagements and stealth have taken over.
But, yeah, in general a pilot that isn’t subject to physical constraints can absolutely out maneuver a human by a wide margin.
The future generation will resemble a Protoss Carrier sans the blimp appearance. Human controllers in 5th and 6th gen airframes who direct multiple AI wingman, or AI swarms.
Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling. Flight suits and training can only do so much to keep the pilot from blacking out.
Can they be piloted remotely? Or would that be too dangerous with latency
Latency, signal interference, and limited human intelligence are all limiting factors in that strategy.
If the enemy interferes with any of those, the enemy wins.
This was is already being fought with autonomous drones. By the end of it, the robots will be unrecognizable to us now.
You’re better off with drones
What’s the difference? A remotely or AI-piloted fogger jet is just a big drone.
Drones are designed without cockpits. Retrofitting remote-control into an F-16 does not seem like the best choice to me.
Retrofitting F-16s to become drones (whether rc or ai-controlled) as well as designing a variant ditching human support for weight and monetary gains is the rational choice as long as non stealth aircraft are viable. In that case you’d stick to F-35s.
It makes no sense to waste billions worth of perfectly capable and proven airframes, engines and avionics. Any future drone that will have at least the same level of capabilities as an f-16 will cost practically cost the same. At the cost of high performance aircraft life support does not add that much cost to a plane, pilot costs (and availability) are a much bigger issue.
But can a drone fly like an F-16?
If an f16 is remote controlled, it’s technically a drone.
AI will win if not now, then soon.
This article didn’t mention it but the AI pilot did win at least one of the engagements during this testing run.
Not that that isn’t interesting, but I’d jump in and insert a major caution here.
I don’t know what is being done here, but a lot of the time, wargaming and/or military exercises are presented in the media as being an evaluation of which side/equipment/country is better in a “who would win” evaluation.
I’ve seen several prominent folks familiar with these warn about misinterpreting these, and I’d echo that now.
That is often not the purpose of actual exercises or wargames. They may be used to test various theories, and may place highly unlikely constraints on one side that favor it or the other.
So if someone says “the US fought China in a series of wargames in the Taiwan Strait and the US/China won in N wargames”, that may or may not be because the wargame planners were trying to find out who is likely to win an actual war, and may or may not have much to to with the expectations the planners have of a win in a typical scenario. They might be trying to find out what would happen in a particular scenario that they are working on and how to plan for that scenario. They may have structured things in a way that are not representative of what they expect to likely come up.
To pull up an example, here’s a fleet exercise that the US ran against a simulated German fleet between World War I and II:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet_problem
Fleet Problem III and Grand Joint Army-Navy Exercise No. 2
During Fleet Problem III, the Scouting Force, designated the “Black Force,” transited from its homeport in the Chesapeake Bay towards the Panama Canal from the Caribbean side. Once in the Caribbean, the naval forces involved in Fleet Problem III joined with the 15th Naval District and the Army’s Panama Division in a larger joint exercise.[9] The Blue force defended the canal from an attack from the Caribbean by the Black force, operating from an advance base in the Azores. This portion of the exercise also aimed to practice amphibious landing techniques and transiting a fleet rapidly through the Panama Canal from the Pacific side.[10]
Black Fleet’s intelligence officers simulated a number of sabotage operations during the course of Fleet Problem III. On January 14, Lieutenant Hamilton Bryan, Scouting Force’s Intelligence Officer, personally landed in Panama with a small boat. Posing as a journalist, he entered the Panama Canal Zone. There, he “detonated” a series of simulated bombs in the Gatun Locks, control station, and fuel depot, along with simulating sabotaging power lines and communications cables throughout the 16th and 17th, before escaping to his fleet on a sailboat.
On the 15th, one of Bryan’s junior officers, Ensign Thomas Hederman, also snuck ashore to the Miraflores Locks. He learned the Blue Fleet’s schedule of passage through the Canal from locals, and prepared to board USS California (BB-44), but turned back when he spotted classmates from the United States Naval Academy - who would have recognized and questioned him - on deck. Instead, he boarded USS New York (BB-34), the next ship in line, disguised as an enlisted sailor. After hiding overnight, he emerged early on the morning of the 17th, bluffed his way into the magazine of the No. 3 turret, and simulated blowing up a suicide bomb - just as the battleship was passing through the Culebra Cut, the narrowest portion of the Panama Canal. This “sank” New York, and blocked the Canal, leading the exercise arbiters to rule a defeat of the Blue Force and end that year’s Grand Joint Army-Navy Exercise.[11][10] Fleet Problem III was also the first which USS Langley (CV-1) took part in, replacing some of the simulated aircraft carriers used in Fleet Problem I.[12]
That may be a perfectly reasonable way of identifying potential weaknesses in Panama Canal transit, but the planners may not have been aiming for the overall goal of evaluating whether, in the interwar period, Germany or the US would likely win in an overall war. Saying that the Black Fleet defeated the Blue Fleet in terms of the rules of the exercise doesn’t mean that Germany would necessarily win an overall war; evaluating that isn’t the purpose of the exercise. If, afterwards, an article says “US wargames show that interwar Germany would most likely defeat the US in a war”, that may not be very accurate.
For the case OP is seeing, it may not even be the case that the exercise planners expect it to be likely for two warplanes to get within dogfighting range. We also do not know what, if any, constraints were placed on either side.
Plus the ai has no risk, outside of basic operation.
Humans have an inherent survival instinct to which drones can just say “lol send the next one I’m dying cya”
To fight optimally, AI needs to have a survival instinct too.
Evolution didn’t settle on “protect my life at all costs” as our default instinct, simply by chance. It did so because it’s the best strategy in a hostile environment.
Only if the goal is reproduction. You need to survive to reproduce.
If the goal is maximum damage for the least amount of economic cost then a suicide (anthropomorphizing the drone here) can very much make sense.
No one would argue that a sword is better than guns or bombs, because you still have the sword after attacking.
It’s the best strategy because it takes decades to make a fully functional human, and you need humans to make more humans, plus there is the issue of genetically sustainable population sizes, etc. A fully functional aeroplane can be made much quicker, in a factory that can spit out several of them in a day. They are more expendable.
Jets are a lot more expensive. What’s at risk is all these resources for the jet going down the drain.
I’d imagine they’d evetually design a jet purpose built for an AI that would be a lot cheaper than a human-oriented one. Removing the need for a cockpit with seats, displays, controls, oxygen, etc would surely reduce cost. It would also open the door for innovations in air-frame design previously impossible.
You mean like:
We keep talking like we’re discussing the future, but autonomous drones are already fighting in the skies of Ukraine.
Begun, the drone wars have.
Huh? Jets are far more replaceable than a human operator who takes years of training and has “needs”.
Ya know unless your military is running on cold war fumes or something and you can’t afford to build an airframe you already have in production
Training a combat pilot used to cost (in early 2000, not sure now) 10M€ for a NATO member.
Find me a modern jet that costs so little. Regardless of what politicians say, human life has a price… and it is waaaay below a jet (even including the training)
Yeah, but procurement of a combat pilot has about a two-decade lead time. You can build more jets a lot quicker (potentially even including the R&D phase).
Also as this war expands to become planet-wide, industrial output of drones will expand many orders of magnitude.
It’s not just money. It’s time, public perception, quantity trainers, quantity student seats etc
A drone is ready the moment it comes off the assembly line, is flashed with software, and tested.
Here comes the juice!
Not so much f16s but the more modern planes can do 16G where the pilot can’t really do more than 9G. But once unshackled from a pilot a lot of instrument weight and pilot survival can be stripped from a plane design and the airframe built to withstand much more, with titanium airframes I see no reason we can’t make planes do sustained unstable turns in excess of 20G.
We might have to start submerging pilots in breathable fluid.
Can’t they literally pull turns that would snap the pilots neck?
A skilled and fit pilot can pull ~9G in a Viper for about 30s.
A computer can pull ~9G for as long has the plane has the speed to pull that hard, or it can pull as hard as it can until the plane snaps in half, because computers don’t suffer from g-LOC.
Can anyone confirm if AI has a neck?
But the supervising wingmen do.
And a mouth ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
ಠ_ಠ
But can they scream?
Not very loud when I’m using it
My neck. My back. Lick my inputs & my headphone-jack.
I’m not an AI expert, but I think it’s got the plane turned the wrong way around.
it’s the ground that’s upside down because it happened on the other side of the globe 😋.
AI has a already won in these confrontations
Surface To Air missile made human piloted aircraft obsolete.
All that’s needed now are a bunch of missiles, plug into an AI program and let it run by itself.
Why would militaries invest in a billion dollar aircraft piloted by a highly trained aircraft pilot with years of training that cost millions of dollars that is probably paid millions over many years … when the pilot and his aircraft can be shot down by a $100,000 missile. If you can’t do it with one missile, send three, four or ten, it’s still cheaper than matching them with an aircraft and pilot.
Instead of investing in expensive aircraft and pilots, all a defending country can do is just spend the same amount of money and surround their country with anti aircraft missiles controlled by AI systems.
Are you not aware of stealth aircraft and evasive maneuvers?
How do you deploy manned fighters against an aircraft you can’t detect?
Edit: As to not downing the aircraft. That’s irrelevant. It wouldn’t matter if it’s an air to air missile or ground to air…you just fire more.
I can buy thousands of rockets for the cost of a single F22 or F16.
How do you deploy manned fighters against an aircraft you can’t detect?
Detect and target aren’t the same thing. There’s various Air Defense platforms that can detect stealth air craft but they lack the resolution necessary to target them. For targetting the launch platform has to be a lot closer.
I can buy thousands of rockets for the cost of a single F22 or F16.
Annnd were back to the Air Defense platforms being hideously expensive. Literally no one can afford enough of them to cover more than a tiny fraction of their air space.
Forget “thousands” of missiles any country larger than a Lichtenstein would to need to buy millions of them along with enough Ground Detection and Launch Stations to cover their entire border. Utterly and totally unaffordable.
Hurrah Liechtenstein, safest country on planet!
You understand you need all that equipment to get a manned fighter close enough to engage. At that point firing a barrage of smart missiles is still cheaper.
And what equipment would that be?
The big cost would be satellite and radar coverage. We have that already.
Why would militaries invest in a billion dollar aircraft piloted by a highly trained aircraft pilot with years of training that cost millions of dollars that is probably paid millions over many years … when the pilot and his aircraft can be shot down by a $100,000 missile.
- Force projection.
- It ain’t that easy to shoot down stealth aircraft.
- Missiles that can successfully shoot down stealth aircraft cost several million dollars each.
- Ground launch systems that can target and engage stealth aircraft, like the US Patriot System, are so horrifically expensive that no nation can afford enough of them to cover more than a fraction of its airspace. That means you need aircraft capable of engaging incoming enemy targets.
In short you are hideously naive.
It ain’t that easy to shoot down stealth aircraft.
Hell, it’s not easy to shoot down non-stealth aircraft
The pilot evaded all six missiles while not being able to deploy any chaff/flare countermeasures.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Hell, it’s not easy to shoot down non-stealth aircraft
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
So many downers here. I see this as the step to the true way war was meant to be fought- with giant robots on the moon.
Robojox_IRL
I see you’re familiar with the Charles Band oeuvre.
In 2020, so-called “AI agents” defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.
It did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.
I’m gonna guess the AI won.
Hahaha how the fuck is AI going to win in air-to-air combat if we completely delete them when playing Ace Combat in the highest difficulty?
Seethe, AI tech bros.
I know right. Aimbots have been around for years.
Tech bros are probably patting themselves in the back for ‘inventing’ difficulty Normal++
So instead of Ai vs human fight… It’s like human vs time to hack?
Yeah, time to add aimbots in the human player fighter jet to make the tech bros seethe in anger even more.
We’ll just start using airburst EMPs
Or it had a fatal error and crashed the plane
I was actually assuming the opposite, because if the AI won they’d want to brag about it.
No way we give up that information for free. Either way it went, the knowledge of it cost a lot to gain and is useful. If it failed you want your enemy wasting money on it. If it succeeded you want your enemy not investing in it.
Bragging just means more money flowing to enemies’ research programs. When a fight is inevitable you want to appear as weak as possible to prevent your enemy from taking it seriously.
You think aliens are actually piloting the craft that come all this way?
You’re never gonna see an alien body because they aren’t here.
Bet we’ve got a drone or two of theirs tho.
I am very confused.
it’s ok, almost nobody else is paying attention to what really matters either
Whether aliens are visiting us matters just about as much as whether tanks are rolling into the village of uncontacted tribes.
Our tactical disadvantage against alien technology is zero, so they have zero priority as targets.
Our best bet is to make friends, converse with them. But they are obviously not interested in talking. So our only option is to pray they continue to let us exist. So far they seem to be.
Sorry, technical advantage is zero. Not disadvantage. We have zero capability to counter alien threats.
You realize that you may edit? :)
I like immutable records. If the contents of the edit were transparent (are they? in the mod log or something?), I’d have no problem with it. Like if the UI showed the final state but I had the whole log of creates and updates available to inspect like wikipedia, that would be cool
Ideally they’d build a vehicle capable of being able to move at rates the human body can’t handle, then train it on that, giving it both a hardware and software advantage.
Is a plane even the best form factor if it’s not limited by human physiology? I imagine an agile missile with smaller missiles attached to it would be better.
Manufacturing costs will probably determine whether it carries missiles, or is a missile.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a drill over Edwards Air Force Base, the pair of F-16 fighter jets flew at speeds of up to 1,200mph and got as close as 600 metres during aerial combat, also known as dogfighting.
While in flight, the AI algorithm relies on analysing historical data to make decisions for present and future situations, according to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which carried out the test.
This process is called “machine learning”, and has for years been tested in simulators on the ground, said DARPA, a research and development agency of the US Department of Defense.
In 2020, so-called “AI agents” defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.
Pilots were on board the X-62A in case of emergency, but they didn’t need to revert controls at any point during the test dogfight, which took place in September last year and was announced this week.
"The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now, said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.
The original article contains 455 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
One step closer to machine domination.
Like, not even in a joking sense. Ukraine is using a ton of drones, the future of physical warfare will simply be a test resources and production.
I’m honestly not sure if this will be good or bad in the longterm. Absolutely saving any amount of human life is a good thing, but when that is no longer a significant factor, I wonder if we will go to (and stay at) war for more trivial reasons.
I’m hoping that the sheer cost of executing that sort of war will continue to be a prohibiting factor like it is today
Ace Combat 7 IRL
