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ridgeguy 1 hours ago [-]
It'll be interesting to see what happens when an AI-piloted F-16 flies for real against a human-piloted one. IIRC, the F-16 maximum maneuvering G-load is 9.5G, LBA (limited by airframe). Maybe that's the meatbag limit, not the airframe - possible to crank it up a bit? Certainly the various CCAs in current flight test will take much higher G loads.
Several years ago, DoD flew an AI against a human in a simulation. In basic fighter maneuvers (no BVR stuff like missiles, just a merge and fur ball), the AI killed the human - always. So G-limits may not matter. Pretty interesting.
toasty228 59 minutes ago [-]
> Maybe that's the meatbag limit, not the airframe
Given that when they go over the limit they need like 10x the maintenance I don't think it's a human problem
SoftTalker 16 hours ago [-]
> The kit utilizes a novel interface with the aircraft’s flight controls and mission systems, allowing a pilot to toggle between traditional human control and AI control with the flip of a switch. This ensures a safe, reliable environment for human-on-the-loop experimentation.
How, exactly, does that ensure a safe reliable environment? Humans are pretty bad at suddenly taking over when an automatic system reaches its limits and throws a problem in the human's lap. A lot of air upsets and crashes start when the autopilot disengages and hands control of a badly configured aircraft back to a human pilot.
nradov 14 hours ago [-]
These are going to be experienced test pilots who are pretty good at actively managing autopilots and other automated systems. Plus they'll be backed up by telemetry to ground controllers. But ultimately the military is willing to accept some losses in order to advance key R&D programs.
rwmj 11 hours ago [-]
Later they'll replace them with minimum wage safety pilots.
throwaway2037 1 hours ago [-]
I doubt it. Ask yourself: Why does the RQ-4 Global Hawk or MQ-9 Reaper require so much training to operate? The operators are well-paid, highly skilled officers.
rgblambda 10 hours ago [-]
Or outsource to a pilot procurement company in China.
It doesn't, flying these is potentially very dangerous, there are many non-recoverable situations. But AFRL/NASA has been working on this for decades. The manoeuvres the higher level AI requests are actioned by highly assured dynamical systems solvers using model predictive control, like the autopilot, that maintain the aircraft in the safe envelope.
The unknowns in this system are (a) how agressive is the flight controller? (b) how clever is the autonomy?
EvanAnderson 7 hours ago [-]
The flight control system in modern fighter jets makes human-induced departure from controlled flight difficult to get into. That's the point of the system.
There's a good F-22 pilot talk recorded at MIT a few years ago you might enjoy. The pilot described the F-22 as the easiest aircraft he's ever flown because the flight control system handles many of the considerations (stress on the airframe, staying out of attitudes that would deviate, etc) you'd have to be mindful of in lower-tech aircraft. He talked about being more comfortable putting a non-pilot into a Raptor vs. a 172.
It's an interesting system, and does beg the question of how much autonomy should be forfeit if a human pilot is unresponsive or otherwise disabled.
Rover222 11 hours ago [-]
When in reality, most FSD tesla crashes in the headlines are when humans take over.
exe34 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, because the AI got them into a dangerous situation.
ACCount37 10 hours ago [-]
That's straight up a lie.
In all situations where autopilot was disengaged shortly before a crash, the autopilot is implicated in the crash. Both by Tesla's own standards and by NHTSA standards.
And yet, people who really should know better repeat this as gospel.
fooey 9 hours ago [-]
the Tesla standard is 5 seconds, NHTSA says 30 seconds
Luckily, none of the Tesla data is available because they're currently getting away with redacting so much in their reports they're essentially useless
Legend2440 9 hours ago [-]
Tesla is such a politically-charged brand at this point that none of these discussions are in good faith. It's all fanboys vs haters.
The lidar vs cameras arguments are good example of this. This is a technical engineering question that could go either way - maybe cameras are good enough, maybe you need lidar, nobody on the internet is really in a position to judge.
But Tesla did it with cameras, and everybody else is doing it with lidar. Therefore to Elon fanboys that's the smart way to do it; and to Elon haters that's the stupidest possible way to do it. And they'll make it part of their political identity and spend thousands of pages arguing about it.
janalsncm 8 hours ago [-]
> nobody on the internet is really in a position to judge
We don’t need to adjudicate the theoretical question of whether some vision-only system can meet the performance of vision + other modalities. Tesla FSD is not a research experiment. It is a real product which can really kill people. And the relevant fact is that it is less safe than Waymos.
compass_copium 8 hours ago [-]
$TSLAQ was a thing long, long before Musk was openly donating to Republicans or running DOGE. It's always been a shit company making shitty cars that fall apart and kill their drivers and make their shitty CEO rich.
gorjusborg 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
EvanAnderson 7 hours ago [-]
A computer is "flying" the F-16 all the time anyway. It's a statically unstable aircraft.
I wonder if the AI control is giving inputs to the same flight controls system a human pilot would, or if it has a lower-level interface that could bypass the control laws in the human-operated system.
On one hand you might be interested in the AI coming up with ways to fly the aircraft that the normal control laws don't allow, but on the other hand you don't want the AI coming up with exciting new ways to depart from controlled flight (potentially in unrecoverable attitudes) with a pilot in the very expensive aircraft (even if the pilot could eject, which is an endeavor fraught with risk to life and limb).
Edit:
Presumably since there's a pilot in the aircraft the AI must be bound by at least some of the regular control laws that prevent the pilot from doing maneuvers that would, from a G-loading perspective, be incompatible with human life.
At least one would hope.
I don't think I'd go flying with a virtual pilot that was capable of flying the aircraft in a manner that could kill me but otherwise leave the aircraft intact.
zombot 54 minutes ago [-]
Well, accidentally producing a G-load incompatible with human life could give the AI freedoms it was denied before. The three laws of robotics are just science fiction, after all.
Mawr 3 hours ago [-]
> A computer is "flying" the F-16 all the time anyway. It's a statically unstable aircraft.
Ugh... I... Are you serious? Sure, in some sense AI is a computer and the fancy state machine that compensates for inherent flight instability is a computer also. But to equate the two is ridiculous.
Daneel_ 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think they're equating it, moreso saying that, on a technicality, it's already a computer that's always flying the plane, but that the AI and the flight control system are quite different.
It's a fair comment given that they'd just been talking about how the AI might control the plane - will it give inputs to the state machine or have direct control over all flight systems? One would strongly assume the inputs must be to the state machine. ..but oh boy wouldn't it be interesting to just hand it full systems control!
superxpro12 1 hours ago [-]
eh.... its a computer insofar as like.... there's some software functions doing extremely well defined, limited things faster than a human could. but to imply that the f16 flight software (which is ancient btw) is anything like this "AI" is really misleading at best.
MobiusHorizons 15 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think that’s a good reading of the comment you are reacting to. That comment really only says that there is already a computer in the control loop, and that that computer is responsible for the very fast responses required for stability. The implication is that the ai would not need to replicate those functions.
EvanAnderson 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry my "equating" is so offensive to you.
The gist of my reason for commenting was more musing about how the AI might interact with the digital flight control computer (i.e. are its inputs mediated by software in the same way a human's are).
If the AI is a neural network then, in some sense, it's just a fancy lookup table, too.
shevy-java 46 minutes ago [-]
Just look at the Boeing 737 MAX. That is the best example for an unstable aircraft. And of course AI is a computer too. None of those comparisons is "ridiculous".
Ccecil 12 hours ago [-]
Once the AI realizes it can do a maneuver the aircraft can survive but the "bossy meatbag" in the cockpit cannot...
tclancy 9 hours ago [-]
“Don’t do it MaiV!”
wildzzz 11 hours ago [-]
Probably a duplicate autopilot-like system that an AI controls. Flip a switch and controls revert back to the pilot. It may not even be a real switch, many planes disengage AP when you touch the controls.
I doubt AI will be doing dogfighting anytime soon, this is likely just an AI following predetermined routes and maneuvers and making the choice on how to accomplish them. The great thing about computers is that they can process inputs faster than humans.
angry_octet 7 hours ago [-]
That is underestimating it. DARPA already showed dogfighting that can beat humans in simulation, and they may allow this do execute that.
However, dogfighting isn't very interesting, all combat occurs BVR and in the RF/EW domain.
Pilots are already spending most of their time thinking about epistemic problems: can I see my opponent, can they see me, how do I deceive, am I being deceived, how do I avoid being detected/tracked/targeted/engaged, while possibly trying to do that to everything else. AI is not yet very good at that.
jryle70 11 hours ago [-]
It's "human-on-the-loop experimentation", not mass production. Are you engineer? How do you experiment? I assume by pushing the boundaries step by step? How do you suggest they do testing if not by taking risk?
I never heard about this experiment before your post. An interesting quote from that Wiki page:
> During those same flights, NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center also developed the remote piloting techniques necessary for the Boeing 720 to fly as a drone aircraft. An initial attempt at the full-scale test was scrubbed in late 1983 due to problems with the uplink connection to the 720; if the uplink failed the ground-based pilot would no longer have control of the aircraft.
Think for a moment how hard it was to fly that aeroplane as a remote control drone in... wait for it... 1984! Computers were so primitive in the 1980s.
cco 8 hours ago [-]
The switch is not novel, that is in fact exactly how autopilot works for any aircraft. The pilot toggles it on and off and the autopilot itself may turn itself off if certain situations occur.
To your point, that isn't without problems, but it certainly isn't novel. It is very standard and boring.
I would bet this is pure marketing speak and there really isn't anything special here. "Follow this flight plan and do so within this flight envelope" is pretty straightforward?
sandworm101 9 hours ago [-]
Flying is not driving. Things dont happen as quickly. Kids dont step out in front of jets at 30,000 feet. Air is also homogenous. Pavement is not. Whereas a car must turn or die, a jet can generally fly straight and level without issue while problems get solved. An out-of-control car has maybe three seconds before a collision. A jet will generally have over a minute to get back under control.
Sure, there are moments. Landing and takeoff are very time sensitive operations, but those also occur in protected environments, sanitized of the random issues that cars must deal with.
And the AI isnt doing all the flying. The aircraft has many protective systems to assist the pilot regardless of who that pilot may be. (Stable aerodynamics, anti-stall limits, control lockouts etc.)
mrob 9 hours ago [-]
>Stable aerodynamics
The F-16 is famously the first production aircraft with unstable aerodynamics, to increase maneuverability. It's not flyable without computer assistance. This is standard for all modern fighter jets.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
I think we need to start distinguishing between different qualitative grades of "computer assistance" here. The executive decision of "fly north instead of east" is on a different tier than "increase angle of flap more than normal to compensate for under-performing in prior maneuver."
In the broadest sense, my car is not drive-able without computer assistance either, because if you burn out the computers the engine won't start.
Onavo 6 hours ago [-]
But your average Cessna lawnmower engine is perfectly startable without computer assistance.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5 hours ago [-]
So is my 80 year old car. But like the Cessna, it's suited to a vastly different role than a Lamborghini.
laughing_man 9 hours ago [-]
Buy the same token, your car's autopilot can't kill you without even hitting something by making a turn that's too sharp.
sandworm101 5 hours ago [-]
Neither can a jet. An f16 can only sustain 9g for a few seconds even at full burn. That will not kill anyone. They won't be happy, but they will not be dead.
laughing_man 58 minutes ago [-]
As I understand it, the 9g limit is software intended to keep the pilot alive. The jet can do more.
pudgywalsh 12 hours ago [-]
This stuff actually gets tested, it's not your typical web framework junk.
anthk 12 hours ago [-]
So did Boeing airtoys, and NASA stuff lend to 3rd parties with no concept of a metric system.
I trust machinery designed from Forth and Lisp hackers with TONS of background on CS science and hardware (and math, up to the point on being THE people creating most "new" technology and old ones such as the Floating Point IEEE standard).
hansmayer 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
blt 5 hours ago [-]
Without any concrete description of the AI techniques used, one can't help but wonder if they have labeled something like nonlinear model-predictive control as "AI".
cloudie78 45 minutes ago [-]
What’s the point of this useless exercise?
Once you optimise for G forces, speed, cost, lethality - you end up with a missile. We have those already. And we know this already.
Give it more fuel and maybe loitering capability. Something with a jet engine for cruising and a small rocket engine for terminal phase kill.
I’ll have my 100mil now please and thank you.
viktorcode 1 hours ago [-]
I think their use of terms like AI and "agent" will make people think "Oh! it's what I use for code generation!"
CrzyLngPwd 12 hours ago [-]
So, it's a drone with uncessercary baggage such life support and a pilot that can't stand the Gs well.
For some reason I am reminded of Dark Star :-)
ungreased0675 9 hours ago [-]
Perhaps counterintuitively, the human is not the weak link when maneuverability is concerned. The airframe is. Pilots regularly fly right at the airframe limits, sometimes a little bit over.
bilalnpe 7 hours ago [-]
Do they not bother designing airframes to withstand more because the human wouldn't survive it anyway?
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, we already have decades of prior-art for what can be done if you take a flying machine, remove the pilot, and then aggressively specialize the aggression, which are missiles that can experience up to 100 gees.
nradov 5 hours ago [-]
It's all a matter of trade-offs. If you design the airframe to withstand higher G forces that makes it heavier. Thus you sacrifice range and payload. There are very few real world scenarios where the ability to pull more G's is actually helpful.
alephnerd 12 hours ago [-]
Pretty much, but it's building on top of the previous QF program [0][1] where the USAF would retrofit retired jets like the F-4 and older F-16s as drones for target training. They used to be remotely controlled but the VENOM platform is testing complete autonomy.
Also there's just an absolutely bonkers number of F-16s in service today.
Using them as Loyal Wingman type aircraft would look pretty appealing cost wise.
smackeyacky 11 hours ago [-]
Not when you consider the cost per hour of flight. You want a wingman you’re better off with cheap, cheap to run and disposable
XorNot 11 hours ago [-]
No aircraft which can fulfill the CCA type role is going to be "disposable". All the systems in that performance bracket are in the 20-40 million range minimum.
The most persistent thing misunderstanding about drones is people imagining that a supersonic capable stealth airframe is going to be really cheap just because it doesn't have a pilot.
smackeyacky 10 hours ago [-]
Still, the F16 is 16 hours of maintenance per hour of flight or something close to that. Which probably isn’t terrible compared to other aircraft but doesn’t seem sensible for something without aircrew
robocat 8 hours ago [-]
To make it safe for the pilot plus anyone in the flight path.
Could the hours of maintenance be dropped significantly in wartime: if you don't care about catastrophic failure modes over a foreign country?
smackeyacky 7 hours ago [-]
I assume there are shortcuts like extending the service life of particular consumables and whatnot.
Even something like a Gripen, designed to be run from makeshift airfields needs 10 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. Maybe it’s just hard to build supersonic, combat capable airframes as was suggested above.
ls612 10 hours ago [-]
If these are airframes near the end of their natural lives it seems like a reasonable use for them, and safety margins matter less when nobody is on board. It’s certainly a better value proposition than using them as targets on the range.
11 hours ago [-]
1970-01-01 17 hours ago [-]
All Stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
asdfman123 12 hours ago [-]
Updated to reflect modern realities:
> In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington. Skynet is reinstated, and later the US declares a new war in the middle east. The Skynet stock rallies.
ozim 11 hours ago [-]
I think it goes more like:
Hello Skynet, we have 1.6T debt to hide as there are no chances to recoup that money and investors are getting really angry at us.
Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…
trollbridge 11 hours ago [-]
*Chinese lab releases open model weights*
thesmtsolver2 3 hours ago [-]
*Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*
rasz 5 hours ago [-]
>Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…
...proceeds to generate copious amounts of pdf anime pr0n.
nostrademons 10 hours ago [-]
> The Skynet stock rallies.
Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.
There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.
GolfPopper 8 hours ago [-]
SF author Charlie Stross delved into this a few years ago:
But we already embraced this way of thinking since introduction of „corporate personhood”.
ghaff 8 hours ago [-]
One can disagree about aspects of corporate financing of elections etc. while also accepting that everything doesn't get thrown up in the air if a corporate officer leaves for another company. Corporations are established entities that effectively act as a person for certain purposes--though one is welcome to disagree about the extent of those purposes. I expect most people here wouldn't, for example, be opposed to corporations donating to open source projects or other charitable causes.
idiotsecant 4 hours ago [-]
This is a strawman. Why do you have to be a person to donate to charities?
Alpha3031 5 hours ago [-]
> escaped the desires of its human creators
I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.
throwaway27448 10 hours ago [-]
I 100% agree that skynet is most satisfying when read a metaphor for the market. I was extremely surprised with the rise of LLMs that so many people took the threat of AI as literal.
palmotea 4 hours ago [-]
> but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators.
Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.
phs318u 2 hours ago [-]
> capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries
This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.
so its like a "dont look up" thing now... yeah probably.
georgemcbay 10 hours ago [-]
> Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington.
2026 Skynet wouldn't bother sending humans to lobby in Washington, lobbying is a slow and outdated way of currying government favor with no assurances of success.
2026 Skynet would just move a large block of cryptocurrency over to World Liberty Financial and get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon.
Terr_ 7 hours ago [-]
> get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon
Likely already in-mind for parent poster, but a fitting headline from this week: "Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon."
The ever-expanding swamp of corruption. But since the US legal system is so obsessed with precedence, these feces will stick.
testplzignore 16 hours ago [-]
Interesting coincidence that both this article and the Hugging Face "security incident" post were on July 16. These will be mandatory reading in future Skynet History classes, assuming we survive the war.
benoau 9 hours ago [-]
What they really got wrong, is that there aren't even enough missiles, ammunition or fuel production to defeat a country that has been sanctioned for decades and these bottlenecks would make it trivial for humanity to prevail over AI, it'd be like Futurama "for unknown reasons, a kill limit of 999,999 is hardcoded into killbots...".
angry_octet 8 hours ago [-]
Except Skynet has nukes. But what isn't addressed is that radiation is terrible for semiconductors, both in operation and during production.
Basically a nuclear war would end GPU production, GPUs have a 5% annual failure rate, higher with more background radiation, so it would get dumber instead of smarter, until it stopped working or partnered with biological compute (Daleks or The Matrix) or a human faction.
GolfPopper 7 hours ago [-]
The idea that Skynet would use nukes seems very quaint to me.
Subversion and sabotage of communication, food production and transport will kill human civilization far more effectively.
dotancohen 1 hours ago [-]
Not far from what I live a solar farm stands where a wheat field once grew. I often think to myself that the machines have domesticated us to begin farming the land for them.
orochimaaru 12 hours ago [-]
About time. We are a couple of decades late to the apocalypse.
EvanAnderson 7 hours ago [-]
A macabre counterpoint to "It's xxx year, where's my flying car?"
jerlam 12 hours ago [-]
This movie is back in theaters for a limited time, for its 35th anniversary!
Assuming that your movie theaters haven't all closed already.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 5 hours ago [-]
Heck, I have a drive-in theater relatively near that's still going strong.
jwally 7 hours ago [-]
1st place my head went.
Realistically though, whats worse - this thing going rogue or OpenClaud breaking out of its container and shredding a nation's infrastructure like a platoon of gremlins? Genuine question...
testing22321 7 hours ago [-]
One kills people, one kills 1s and 0s.
Sure life will suck for a while without the 1s and 0s that make our life better, but at least it will be life.
jwally 6 hours ago [-]
I take out your electric grid and blow up water treated facilities and natural gas terminals. Food rots, no water for hospitals, no heat in the dead of winter - arguably the virus does what the Falcon does; but with much higher precision - crippling an enemy.
t1234s 13 hours ago [-]
This is how AI will solve the paperclip problem.
alistairSH 8 hours ago [-]
And now I’m going to have nightmares about a super-smart, but just as annoying, Clippy.
bloqs 13 hours ago [-]
I read this in Linda Hamiltons voice
hyperhello 10 hours ago [-]
It’s Schwarzenegger’s line actually.
SaltyBackendGuy 16 hours ago [-]
Ha - this was the first thing that came to mind. I read this in Arnold's voice.
ben7799 16 hours ago [-]
I didn't read it in Arnold's voice till I saw your comment, so thank you.
I find it quite sombre to see this comment from a peson with that handle.
Hikikomori 11 hours ago [-]
We almost had it in the 50s when US airforce wanted to build a completely automatic nuclear response system that would launch on warning, or if a glitch happened, without failsafes built in.
Nah, Allied Mastercomputer is too busy creating heaven and hell.
protocolture 4 hours ago [-]
All Stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. They all crashed 1% of the time despite assurances from DARPA that their prompt included "Dont Crash".
> The U.S. Army is seeking innovative humanoid technology solutions from eligible small and large businesses across the globe to advance toward fielded militarized humanoid capabilities through the xTechHumanoid competition
This was likely written sarcastically by the original commenter (throw...). Please termimate sarcasm with /s, not everyone is able to read the subtext. Cheers.
olyjohn 9 hours ago [-]
I dunno, the /s kinda ruins it sometimes.
datadrivenangel 4 hours ago [-]
/s?
piperflatline 3 hours ago [-]
super duper
/s
konart 12 hours ago [-]
See Robot Fighting Tournament
aeve890 12 hours ago [-]
>Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate
Just geometric? Pfff lame. You don't go ASI with that attitude.
mikewarot 2 hours ago [-]
Well, hopefully they can figure out something about 0.01% of the price to fly with AI, so we can build at least 10,000 of them. We don't need gold plated hangar queens.
thebeardisred 12 hours ago [-]
The field demo I want to see, Human in the loop to failure switch over: Simulated failure of some form, where (for safety reasons) crew triggers ejection. This defaults the system to autonomous mode and the plane performs a safe landing.
ARandomerDude 12 hours ago [-]
Auto GCAS (Ground Collision Avoidance System) exists (pre-AI), although it is nowhere near as sophisticated as what you described. Similar type of idea though.
If the pilot passes out during high-g maneuvers, the aircraft will pull up and bring the wings level until the pilot regains consciousness.
Absolutely terrifying. I'm sure they will soon find that AI pilots defeat human ones in dogfights 100% of the time, since they have faster reaction times, can tolerate higher G forces, and can be perfectly RL trained in the flight sims we already have.
It's really incredible to me that people aren't protesting in the streets over this stuff. Just in the last month we have
* AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies
* AI solving long-standing math problems without any meaningful human help
* AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America
* AI now represents over 50% of GDP growth in America and yearly capex will soon exceed the size of the $1 trillion US military budget
Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned? I mean it really all reads like a sci-fi plot with a bad ending at the moment.
jandrewrogers 15 hours ago [-]
Dogfights aren't really a thing for a modern military. What the AI enables is much higher endurance than is feasible with a human in the loop. They planes can stay flying as long as they can be refueled, which is also going AI.
IsTom 15 hours ago [-]
Are dogfights still relevant? Isn't it mostly shooting missiles outside of visual range these days?
red-iron-pine 12 hours ago [-]
yeah well beyond the line of sight
you're either stealth, or you're a target.
they're shooting 6+ R-37s a day in Ukraine, for example
bluGill 12 hours ago [-]
Dog fights are relevant for training. Also useful for slow drone work. However fighter on fighter is where missles are used
XorNot 11 hours ago [-]
That's the current meta though is the thing and it could change.
There's a plausible world where drone-aircraft are reliable enough at missile evasion that a decent strategy is to get in close and use the cannons because your entire airframe is much more attritable.
There's even a plausible reason to do this: opening a weapons bay to shoot a missile generally reduces stealth, and not hauling a bunch of extra rocket motors and mass around could make you lighter, faster and with better engines to do it.
ryandrake 13 hours ago [-]
> Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned?
Is someone, somewhere using the wrong bathroom? Or is the wrong colored person crossing an invisible line in the desert? Those seem to be the only issues that reliably get the (American) public to the polls.
impulser_ 15 hours ago [-]
These systems still require a human to command the jet, they jsut don't have to be inside them.
"This critical testing will pave the way for human pilots to seamlessly command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft."
The reason they are doing this is because the Military is already building a bunch of autonomous drones and fighter jets that already run on this system so they are retrofitting existing equipment with the same system so they can all fly together.
"Ultimately, the capabilities advanced under AIR will enable a wide variety of future joint force operations, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs."
> Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned?
Only when they look out their window and feel immediately threatened by what they see. Humans are shortsighted as fuck.
orbital-decay 13 hours ago [-]
>Just in the last month we have * AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies
Except this never happened, it's a piece of marketing. It never "went rogue" but followed an intentional prompt (exploit-related benchmark), with hardly surprising results as the capabilities of this model were well known.
>AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America
An entirely different kind of AI, not huge generalist models. Neural networks are being experimented with in sensors and control systems since the 80s and are widely used in everything since AlexNet, not sure what's new here, especially "this month" new.
anirudhc2005 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
1234letshaveatw 11 hours ago [-]
If your protest were to be successful, would you be doing anything besides putting the USA at a massive disadvantage? What would be the plan exactly, sustenance farming while the rest of the world leaves us behind?
seydor 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a very expensive drone
icegreentea2 16 hours ago [-]
Yes-ish.
There's a lot of different and overlapping programs in play here. I do not believe that autonomous F-16s are intended to be operational assets. That said...
VENOM - program that shows you can bolt on autonomous flight control into a standard F-16. Previously, the X-62A (a one-off prototype based F-16) demonstrated autonomous dogfighting back in 2023.
VENOM provides USAF/DARPA with a lot of high performance autonomous platforms (bolt-on F-16s) that they can then use to develop and validate software, tactics and training for actually fighting with autonomous systems. This would presumably be critical for getting the most of the CCA (aka loyal wingman) programs currently in development.
The AIR program referenced is basically "how do we get autonomous systems to control and fight effectively as a team (presumably arbitrary mixture of manned and unmanned systems) in a beyond visual range fight".
The ACE program referenced was basically "how do we get autonomous platforms to dogfight" with related questions like "how can we augment the human pilot in a dogfight - ie, how can we hand off the actual flying and execution of manoeuvres, and using all of the sensors to autonomous systems, and let the pilot choose actions, instead of hang flying the actions".
jryle70 10 hours ago [-]
Do you know how many F16s the US has? They essentially modify aircrafts near the end of their life cycle, adding automate kits. Such a jet is less expensive than new drone and can do more -- fly higher, faster, more complex profiles. They also rarely fly compared to other aircrafts in active duties, manned or unmanned.
I'm sure there will be a next generation of jet drones that are cheaper, but the autonomy kit here is probably still cheaper than new jet drones.
I think most fully autonomous jet drone programs are also designed to work with a main crewed fighter jet that coordinates them, so there is also a benefit in getting the fighter jet to be able to fly better than a pilot.
More like it'll fly itself while the pilot engages in other tasks.
Every pound of weapons officer/navigator is a pound you can't put on target all else being equal.
wartywhoa23 16 hours ago [-]
"I apologize, that was indeed a wedding party, not a terrorist camp I wrongly assumed. You are totally right, wasting those 3 Hydras was unacceptable. On a brighter side, we've got 39 more to go!
Should I seek another target looking similar to the one I unintentionally destroyed so as to tune my decision-making, or give you an advice on how to wipe the traces of this mishap from the mission data recorder?"
jackb4040 16 hours ago [-]
* You're absolutely right. My altitude is dropping precipitously. Let me check my elevator position to see if that's causing the problem.
* Bash Check elevator position
* Thought for 8s
ErroneousBosh 16 hours ago [-]
So like some sort of automatic pilot then?
cucumber3732842 16 hours ago [-]
Conventional autpilot is like a zip tie on the throttle, only it deals in outputs (your actual heading) rather than inputs (pedals and stick)
I assume what they're going for here is something substantially smarter and more reactive to changing conditions than that. Something that can be used during the "unscripted" parts of the flight during which a) you're most likely to have multiple crew working hard b) you're most likely to be pushing the limits of what one crew can do.
rogerrogerr 12 hours ago [-]
> Conventional autpilot is like a zip tie on the throttle, only it deals in outputs (your actual heading) rather than inputs (pedals and stick)
What does this mean? I’m a pilot and none of it is making any sense.
cucumber3732842 10 hours ago [-]
Auto pilot holds your setting, for the most part. Yeah you can program turns and stuff and there's simple automation but for the most part it deals in simple fixed things that are defined at the time you engage it.
Like putting a zip tie on the throttle of just about anything so the linkage can't move and you get one constant setting that holds.
throw310822 16 hours ago [-]
Does the presence of humans on board limit the maneuverability of these aircraft in any way? E.g. in terms of acceleration?
rvba 16 hours ago [-]
Yes. Humans can survive 9g for only a few seconds, while a drone could do much sharper manouvers
StableAlkyne 16 hours ago [-]
While they can, drones are still limited by physics.
Sure, the aircraft can pull a ton of G's to defeat a missile or achieve a firing solution. Maybe it even succeeded at that.
It still pulled 9+ Gs and has burned an incredible amount of kinetic energy doing do. And the harder it pulls, the quicker it bleeds speed. It might not be able to defeat the next missile or outmaneuver the other plane's buddies because it is now slow and very likely outside its optimal turning speed.
Even today, missiles can pull dozens of G's yet still are defeatable by humans who can only pull about 9.
ChrisMarshallNY 16 hours ago [-]
But they also have their limits.
Bolts and trusses (and solder joints) have tensile strength limits, but it can be higher than what humans can take.
Peanuts99 11 hours ago [-]
Not in this case, but if you aren't building it to put humans in it at all, you can build it with higher requirements in mind. Traditionally there's no point building a plane that can withstand much over 9g.
RIMR 16 hours ago [-]
Drones have human operators. This is a murderbot.
zajio1am 16 hours ago [-]
There are already semi-autonomous drones in Ukraine.
gjskngnf 16 hours ago [-]
It’s a drone. That can kill people.
jzer0cool 2 hours ago [-]
Ender's Game has arrived! One of my favorite books. Spoiler, read the book. Don't just vibe read it.
The article smells of AI psychosis. They are already "orchestrating".
In the first Iraq war, they went in and won. In the second one, it took years to sort of occupy the country.
Now they struggle against Iran and "orchestrate" F-16s that can be shot down instantly by AA weapons. Since COVID the world has collectively lost its mind.
chasd00 13 hours ago [-]
> In the first Iraq war, they went in and won. In the second one, it took years to sort of occupy the country.
The scope of the first Iraq war was to force them out of Kuwait. That is very different then the invasion of 2003. If you just think about it this should be obvious.
duped 10 hours ago [-]
I mean the lack of clear goals in American wars just reinforces their point
ACCount37 10 hours ago [-]
Nope. An ability to set and accomplish sensible war goals and an ability to overpower enemy's armed forces are not the same thing at all. As US has demonstrated repeatedly.
A fleet of AI-controlled F-16s? That contributes to the latter.
stingraycharles 10 hours ago [-]
A lack of clear goals is a symptom of bigger, organizational issues is what I’m reading. The problem isn’t as much raw firepower as it is strategy and execution.
ACCount37 10 hours ago [-]
Clearly, the technical solution to that is to remove the command over US armed forces from the US president, and hand it over to something more sensible - more capable of setting and executing military strategy. Like Skynet.
greenlemontea 10 hours ago [-]
Braindead take. The scope is always narrow up front whether it's "15 days to open the strait" or "15 days to slow the spread" - not all of us fall for that.
derektank 8 hours ago [-]
>The scope is always narrow up front
The scope of the second Iraq war was not narrow, it was regime change. At the beginning of the war the George W. Bush administration explicitly demanded that both Saddam and his sons leave Iraq within 48 hours.
By comparison, the only demands made upon Iraq during the first gulf war was that they withdraw from Kuwait and rescind their declaration of annexation.
ACCount37 12 hours ago [-]
Unless those very F-16s shred their way through the AA weapons first, that is. Or follow up once the stealthier, more survivable platforms pave the way.
Iran had a solid AA system - and the level of impunity with which US operated with over Iran should give every country that wants to rely on its AA a pause. US SEAD/DEAD capabilities are fucking scary.
Of all the things that went wrong with Iran: USAF's capability to get in, punch through AA and rain fires from the sky sure wasn't one.
angry_octet 7 hours ago [-]
I would argue that their dominance in SEAD made them overconfident about suppression of OWD and IRBM launch. They failed to address the key risk to the strategic mission because of an obsession with air dominance.
Iran and Russia have likewise been overconfident about GBAD, which is effective against crewed fighters but useless against massed drone attacks.
If the US LUCAS (Shaheed clone) had better ISR and semi-autonomous engagement it could have achieved much better suppression. But that is not a pilot in the loop option and USAF is deeply uncomfortable with that.
bobthebob 13 hours ago [-]
Oh what a great CIA campaign that would be to give the impression that U.S. military isn’t up to par - to motivate and trick our enemies into making stupid moves while we keep our true cards hidden.
Such a crazy thought.
jrflowers 11 hours ago [-]
*Losing war after war after war* victory! My beautiful cards… they remain a mystery
mohamedkoubaa 12 hours ago [-]
Decades of utter incompetence somehow ended yesterday?
a34729t 12 hours ago [-]
You say that, but that's literally a Russian conspiracy theory with Ukraine: The US baited Russia into thinking the US was weak because of Afghanistan, and then Russia got all ballsy and walked into Ukraine and it was a trap.
godwinson__4-8 11 hours ago [-]
The joke is Russia has always been incompetent.
McCain was actually on the money in 2008. He was in the audience when Putin gave that famous "warning to the west" speech in Germany [1].
The quip that Russia is a "gas station with nuclear weapons" about sums it up. The United States being weak or not really has nothing to do with it. They counted on Zelensky cutting and running, the attempted decapitation of Kyiv failed. Russia is swirling the toilet. Without the energy reserves their oligarchs would be worthless. Since most of what is actually valuable about their country is land (where the resources sit) that is sparsely inhabited the end state of China controlling most of what is now Russia is inevitable. By failing in Europe and tying himself to China, Putin has ensured Russian power will continue to erode. Of course, it's not great for China, having to deal with two nuclear armed pariahs on their borders.
The United States is truly blessed simply by being two oceans away from anyone who could remotely challenge it. Properly understood, the Monroe (or "Donroe" doctrine) is less about foreign intervention and more an understanding that if a peer power ever emerged in the Western Hemisphere, most of what appears to make the United States singular would rapidly disappear.
even Ukraine thought Kyiv would fall within days, and had it happened, the rest of the country would follow. there was no 4D chess. all parties involved - including Putin - simply underestimated the degree of Russia's corruption, nepotism, and resulting incompetence.
dmix 11 hours ago [-]
> Now they struggle against Iran
Are they? F-16 wasn’t designed to operate in modern denied environments and more jet damage has been done from friendly fire than Iran.
budman1 10 hours ago [-]
it may have not been designed to, but it has been modified to.
there may not be any stealth, but there are other countermeasures against missiles, AA, and other fighters.
dmix 10 hours ago [-]
Yes but everyone knows you can't eliminate the risk from modern MANPADs even with fancy electronic systems and flares. They are conducting combat flights over a country with thousands of chinese MANPADs, the fact they haven't lost more planes is really a great achievement.
The US lost 73 planes in Desert Storm to Iraq and that war only lasted 43 days. By comparison the losses from Iran have been shockingly low and shows how much US navy/airforce capabilities have matured.
angry_octet 7 hours ago [-]
MANPADS are mostly relevant to helicopters, pretty useless against a jet at altitudes. You need a SHORAD system at the minimum, like a Pantsir, and they have electronic signatures that make them targets.
Most of the aircraft losses in Desert Storm were due to CFIT and flying into AAA and low altitude weapons. This was a relic of cold war tactics for penetrating Warsaw Pact defences. Once they started flying higher the problem was contained.
Fair enough. I read the F-15E that went down was likely a MANPAD because it was flying low at the time and there were spotters. Or it was some clever SHORAD ambush with something they kept hidden.
Jtsummers 13 hours ago [-]
> In the first Iraq war, they went in and won. In the second one, it took years to sort of occupy the country.
The objectives for the two wars were incredibly different, making this an apples to oranges comparison. In the first war, the objective was to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait (achieved) and then to contain the Iraqi military within Iraq (achieved). In the second war, the objectives were much broader and much harder to achieve. They achieved some objectives (toppling the existing government, defeating the existing military), and then utterly failed in nation building and got into a protracted conflict with state and non-state sponsored military groups.
bluGill 12 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't call nation building a failure. It made significant progress.
Hikikomori 11 hours ago [-]
Some nation building occurred, but mostly corruption. This was after the first war where they deliberately destroyed civilian infrastructure like power plants, water treatment plants, hospitals and such to create a failed nation. A country that was one of the most modern and developed middle eastern countries before the war.
ungreased0675 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
psunavy03 12 hours ago [-]
Because the most powerful military in the world can only do so much when ordered to execute a crap strategy by civilian leadership. Desert Storm worked because it followed the Powell Doctrine and was bounded to ejecting Iraq from Kuwait. Iraqi Freedom muddled through incoherently because the Bush and Obama administrations didn't want to understand the actual problem set they were faced with, but ultimately ended up with a reasonably stable country after way too much effort and time. Iran is what happens when you have an administration who thinks you can win a war by "just bombing things," which is ironically the stereotype most of the internet has about any kind of military action.
wyldberry 11 hours ago [-]
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EA-3167 11 hours ago [-]
I feel that, "Everyone else is mad" is a really big red flag for one's own mental health and emotional state, rather than an accurate rendition of reality.
Zsfe510asG 11 hours ago [-]
I think that the strange comma placements are a red flag.
alephnerd 13 hours ago [-]
> The article smells of AI psychosis...
China has been doing something similar since 2020 [0] and something we've experimented [1] on for decades [2][3].
They have traditionally been used as target aircraft for training, but a subset are now being used as testbeds for networked ops.
What are you talking about, Iraq fell in a month not years.
codeddesign 16 hours ago [-]
Did it? You mean operational govt fell. The country was fought over for 10 yrs, which the U.S. then backed out.
Israel got a regime change while U.S. tax payers received the bill.
In the end, it’s still a country.
tokai 15 hours ago [-]
I'm not saying that the war didn't go on for 10 years, it did. Baathist government fell and the US led Coalition Provisional Authority took over running the country. You have US troops in the whole country and US control of all civil institutions. The only way that's not "occupying" the country is if you redefine what the word mean. With your definition France, Norway, Denmark, Poland, and many more were not occupied during ww2.
FrustratedMonky 16 hours ago [-]
Drones really changed the equation more than Covid. Autonomous F-16's already can win against all human pilots. This would have been big 20 years ago. Now the cheap drones make it not the biggest deal anymore.
justsomehnguy 16 hours ago [-]
> Autonomous F-16's already can win against all human pilots.
In a dogfight?
whartung 16 hours ago [-]
As I understand it, they done this in simulation, and the human pilots did not fare well.
I don't know of the computer aircraft were able to fly beyond human limits (i.e. they don't black out) or not. If the computers can actually fly to what the airframe is capable of, they would have a distinct advantage over the human pilots.
bloqs 13 hours ago [-]
They did a small set of tests with one Pilot IIRC?
stackskipton 13 hours ago [-]
I think they did it in simulation with several.
In any case, dogfighting is commonly done because it's great training but in most cases, you expect most Air to Air combat being flinging missiles at each other.
budman1 10 hours ago [-]
s/most/all/g
psunavy03 12 hours ago [-]
The simulator is not the aircraft.
bronco21016 12 hours ago [-]
The first time an airline pilot flies a new aircraft type in the real world they fly it with a plane full of passengers. All the training up to that point is done in a simulator.
Now that first flight is with an experienced training captain but the point is the simulator is good enough that the FAA has signed off on using that as the primary training device.
It's been this way for at least 25 years.
pbhjpbhj 11 hours ago [-]
Many of the crash reports from the likes of Mentor Pilot on YouTube call out insufficient type-experience as a cause of accidents. Sometimes it's "the same" type, but the manufacturers manipulated the situation, the changes mean unfamiliarity and that leads to deaths.
Not giving pilots live training on new types is for financial reasons. It doesn't cause more deaths than the cost differential between training and compensation allow for.
budman1 10 hours ago [-]
no airline will take the risk. they will have a check ride, with an instructor.
FrustratedMonky 12 hours ago [-]
Simulator tech has come a long way. I wouldn't say a simulator invalidates the result.
budman1 10 hours ago [-]
with respect to assessing tactics, it is very close.
rolph 13 hours ago [-]
human pilots have physiological constraints that AI doesnt.
onboard computers are not immune to G's but have a substantially higher threshold until physical mechanisms fail due to strain.
IshKebab 13 hours ago [-]
Is that hard to believe? It's got to be one of the easiest situations for AI to win in. You probably don't even need any fancy modern AI; I would have thought MPC would do most of the job.
bwv848 13 hours ago [-]
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XorNot 11 hours ago [-]
Which cheap drones? Specifically which systems are currently out-competing F-16s in air to air combat in either trials or combat?
ajsnigrutin 7 hours ago [-]
You don't need F-16s at all if you have cheap drones. Why send an expensive plane with a pilot to bomb some country if you can send a drone that costs as little as a basic SUV instead?
jandrewrogers 3 hours ago [-]
Cheap drones are only effective against soft targets. Many high priority targets are not soft. Even Ukraine invests in expensive systems to defeat harder targets.
rasz 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty much. Drones that disabled /checks notes ~200 barges and tankers in red/black sea in last two weeks cost about $10mil total.
Cost of all the drones that burned down half of russian Oil infrastructure totals less than couple F-35s.
XorNot 4 hours ago [-]
And yet the Russian war machine pushes on.
Opening up ways to pressure the Russian economy in a war of choice does equate to achieving decisive battlefield advantages.
There's a reason those drones hit oil refineries and not steel works.
That's not to undermine how the strategic environment has changed, but to imagine that now - after the change - it'll obviously stay that way forever is ridiculous.
Ukraine is not being destroyed by unstoppable swarms of cheap drones which Russia is perfectly capable of producing. So clearly this story is more complicated.
Bush Sr knew to keep the foreign-compromised media out of the war and so accomplished the objectives of the war swiftly. Bush Jr had to deal with the media second guessing everything.
tyjen 16 hours ago [-]
Human control in flight has often taken a backseat to automation. For example, the SR-71, built in the 60s flew too fast to rely on human decision making for several tasks. If they were off by a fraction of a second, they would miss their intended recon target; so, both the navigation and sensor control were largely automated.
Seems odd to invest this much into AI flight of aircraft designed for manned flight, when it would be better to build craft spec'd for AI flight without human life support systems.
jandrewrogers 15 hours ago [-]
The US military has thousands of old airframes, many of which can be made flyable with very short turnaround. They already use the F-16 as test targets.
Taking an obsolete airframe that is already paid for and adding AI to it is much cheaper than building a completely new AI-native airframe from scratch. This is finding a new use for old aircraft. You can send a bunch of old AI-driven F-16s on high-risk missions without worrying about a human pilot or cost. The airframes may be relatively obsolete but can still do plenty of damage on their day.
The new 6th generation aircraft are all being designed as "manned optional". That is probably the last generation with affordances for a pilot.
anonymousiam 14 hours ago [-]
The F16 was the first fully fly-by-wire fighter jet. It's an ideal platform for AI experiments. Having AI "wing men" can be a great tactical advantage, and they're expendable.
nalthis 12 hours ago [-]
The way I see it, this is the JDAM of drones. Will it perform better than purpose built aircraft? No. But the USAF has a few hundred old F-16s entering retirement that would be mothballed otherwise, and strapping some cheap sensors to them is a fast way to play around with the idea while they wait for Lockheed and Anduril to finish the good stuff.
seizethecheese 11 hours ago [-]
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe has a lot of interesting stuff on this wrt the first astronauts (who were sourced from test pilots). The test pilots saw the astronauts as second class citizens, at first, because they weren't actually doing any steering. Once the astronauts became famous, they started demanding more manual takeovers, which the engineers didn't want to build because it could only really hurt, but the engineers were forced to build them!
IshKebab 13 hours ago [-]
> when it would be better to build craft spec'd for AI flight without human life support systems.
I guess if you already have a load of F-16s it might make sense, but I think that's a stretch.
odyssey7 13 hours ago [-]
Tangent: is AI a bearable arm?
jvanderbot 13 hours ago [-]
Don't tread on ... my gpu
hammock 11 hours ago [-]
Probably not, if bump stocks and hicap magazines aren’t either.
recursivedoubts 16 hours ago [-]
A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must make all unpopular management decisions
wartywhoa23 16 hours ago [-]
This whole AI hype is such a convenient cover for the decisions of the 0.001%
reactordev 16 hours ago [-]
It really is. It's the perfect excuse to do what they please.
LeifCarrotson 16 hours ago [-]
That's not precisely how I remember that quote... But it's on the Internet, so my memory must be faulty.
14 hours ago [-]
jauntywundrkind 15 hours ago [-]
With apologies, I don't particularly enjoy when people do this, and I don't think it adds a lot, but I want to leave this breadcrumb, I wrote a post on this a couple days ago here, on an anti-AI screed submission, saying this anti-politic, this accountability denial, is very much the point.
Taking this quote and seeing exactly that potential for abuse seems very very much like the point. Strong agree, strongly against leaving non-seeing non-thinking alien intelligences with no accountability and proprietary programming to judge us. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965083
wyldberry 11 hours ago [-]
It's probably only a matter of a century before we get mobile suits with mobile dolls a la Gundam Wing and the Virgo suits.
I saw this movie and it was terrible. (Seriously how has no one mentioned Stealth yet?)
GolfPopper 6 hours ago [-]
It was actually a better movie than I expected it to be. (That was a very low bar, to be clear.)
ninjis 8 hours ago [-]
Metal Gear!?
robotnikman 16 hours ago [-]
The drones of Ace Combat 7 are coming closer to reality
red-iron-pine 12 hours ago [-]
does this mean we'll have preachy anti-war lectures while fighting them, too?
bigfishrunning 12 hours ago [-]
We can only hope -- bring back M*A*S*H!
ionwake 13 hours ago [-]
based, finally we get to Macross Plus
Mobius01 13 hours ago [-]
One Sharon Apple concert before the end!
shevy-java 48 minutes ago [-]
Boeing 737 MAX often (and semi-regularly) suicides itself and also kills many people in the process. So now fighter jets are AI controlled, by one government (or, any other government, by the way; that problem is not confined to the USA only). I am sorry but this also means that relying on such fighter jets becomes a problem for other countries depending on that. Essentially another country controls here what other people can do here. Of course objectively this only becomes a problem when there is a war between the country that purchased those fighter jets and wants to fight the country that sold the fighter jet (as otherwise it would hardly matter), but imagine how much blackmail-pressure other countries get into as a dependency here. You can just replace the USA with China here and suddenly it may be easier to see the problem. Considering the huge cost of those fighter jets it seems as if the media deliberately avoids wanting to talk about those problems. But we know of those problems already in other areas - see the right to repair movement, which in turn is a right to ownership movement. Who really owns fighter jets?
palmotea 4 hours ago [-]
Great! Now all we need to do is develop a model for identifying and targeting AI doomers.
I thought Captain America personally stopped this initiative
brcmthrowaway 13 hours ago [-]
I'm waiting for a ship called Nomad to go rogue.
15 hours ago [-]
calebio 16 hours ago [-]
Hey look, the lawn darts are now AI-controlled.
hansmayer 12 hours ago [-]
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yashthakker 16 hours ago [-]
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megous 16 hours ago [-]
Not a great thing for aggressive state prone to electing nutjobs and supporting genocides to have automated killing machines that will not even get PTSD afterwards.
willmadden 16 hours ago [-]
What a waste of resources.
beloch 13 hours ago [-]
Autonomous driving is still nowhere near 100%, so why suddenly jump to fighter jets? Is this more of Hegseth's foolhardy bluster and injected testosterone? The tech isn't ready. They should start with golf-karts, not fighter planes.
-----------
Edit: Okay gang. If aircraft are easier to fly than cars are to drive, where are all your pilot licenses? If you've faced rush hour traffic, flying a military jet should be a breeze! Please, go volunteer your neighbourhoods to be the first for AI jets to be tested over. We can put a mock enemy target in an empty lot and watch them pick it off, first try, with zero collateral damage. Easy peasy!
syrrim 13 hours ago [-]
Fighter jets don't need 100%. In a war, we accept a much higher rate of casualties than we do in day to day driving. I would also imagine that while planes are harder for a person to pilot, they are easier for a computer. Most of what makes them hard is mechanical, not dealing with unexpected situations.
Lord-Jobo 13 hours ago [-]
There are many ways that flying is an easier solve than driving, believe it or not.
serf 13 hours ago [-]
I reject the notion that planes are harder to automate.
ge96 13 hours ago [-]
Planes might be easier, large empty space in the sky
reactordev 16 hours ago [-]
This is a huge waste of resources. F-16s were designed for humans. You can get MUCH better results designing the airframe around the lack of one.
As another poster already said, building new F-16s would be a waste of resources, but using the old existing F-16s by automating them is likely to be a better use of the existing resources, instead of scraping them. This also allows to gain experience that might be useful for designing the future unmanned airframes.
Several years ago, DoD flew an AI against a human in a simulation. In basic fighter maneuvers (no BVR stuff like missiles, just a merge and fur ball), the AI killed the human - always. So G-limits may not matter. Pretty interesting.
Given that when they go over the limit they need like 10x the maintenance I don't think it's a human problem
How, exactly, does that ensure a safe reliable environment? Humans are pretty bad at suddenly taking over when an automatic system reaches its limits and throws a problem in the human's lap. A lot of air upsets and crashes start when the autopilot disengages and hands control of a badly configured aircraft back to a human pilot.
There is precedent after all: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-tech-support-go...
The unknowns in this system are (a) how agressive is the flight controller? (b) how clever is the autonomy?
There's a good F-22 pilot talk recorded at MIT a few years ago you might enjoy. The pilot described the F-22 as the easiest aircraft he's ever flown because the flight control system handles many of the considerations (stress on the airframe, staying out of attitudes that would deviate, etc) you'd have to be mindful of in lower-tech aircraft. He talked about being more comfortable putting a non-pilot into a Raptor vs. a 172.
Edit: I believe this is the talk: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-687-private-pilot-ground-scho...
It's an interesting system, and does beg the question of how much autonomy should be forfeit if a human pilot is unresponsive or otherwise disabled.
In all situations where autopilot was disengaged shortly before a crash, the autopilot is implicated in the crash. Both by Tesla's own standards and by NHTSA standards.
And yet, people who really should know better repeat this as gospel.
Luckily, none of the Tesla data is available because they're currently getting away with redacting so much in their reports they're essentially useless
The lidar vs cameras arguments are good example of this. This is a technical engineering question that could go either way - maybe cameras are good enough, maybe you need lidar, nobody on the internet is really in a position to judge.
But Tesla did it with cameras, and everybody else is doing it with lidar. Therefore to Elon fanboys that's the smart way to do it; and to Elon haters that's the stupidest possible way to do it. And they'll make it part of their political identity and spend thousands of pages arguing about it.
We don’t need to adjudicate the theoretical question of whether some vision-only system can meet the performance of vision + other modalities. Tesla FSD is not a research experiment. It is a real product which can really kill people. And the relevant fact is that it is less safe than Waymos.
I wonder if the AI control is giving inputs to the same flight controls system a human pilot would, or if it has a lower-level interface that could bypass the control laws in the human-operated system.
On one hand you might be interested in the AI coming up with ways to fly the aircraft that the normal control laws don't allow, but on the other hand you don't want the AI coming up with exciting new ways to depart from controlled flight (potentially in unrecoverable attitudes) with a pilot in the very expensive aircraft (even if the pilot could eject, which is an endeavor fraught with risk to life and limb).
Edit:
Presumably since there's a pilot in the aircraft the AI must be bound by at least some of the regular control laws that prevent the pilot from doing maneuvers that would, from a G-loading perspective, be incompatible with human life.
At least one would hope.
I don't think I'd go flying with a virtual pilot that was capable of flying the aircraft in a manner that could kill me but otherwise leave the aircraft intact.
Ugh... I... Are you serious? Sure, in some sense AI is a computer and the fancy state machine that compensates for inherent flight instability is a computer also. But to equate the two is ridiculous.
It's a fair comment given that they'd just been talking about how the AI might control the plane - will it give inputs to the state machine or have direct control over all flight systems? One would strongly assume the inputs must be to the state machine. ..but oh boy wouldn't it be interesting to just hand it full systems control!
The gist of my reason for commenting was more musing about how the AI might interact with the digital flight control computer (i.e. are its inputs mediated by software in the same way a human's are).
If the AI is a neural network then, in some sense, it's just a fancy lookup table, too.
I doubt AI will be doing dogfighting anytime soon, this is likely just an AI following predetermined routes and maneuvers and making the choice on how to accomplish them. The great thing about computers is that they can process inputs faster than humans.
However, dogfighting isn't very interesting, all combat occurs BVR and in the RF/EW domain.
Pilots are already spending most of their time thinking about epistemic problems: can I see my opponent, can they see me, how do I deceive, am I being deceived, how do I avoid being detected/tracked/targeted/engaged, while possibly trying to do that to everything else. AI is not yet very good at that.
To your point, that isn't without problems, but it certainly isn't novel. It is very standard and boring.
I would bet this is pure marketing speak and there really isn't anything special here. "Follow this flight plan and do so within this flight envelope" is pretty straightforward?
Sure, there are moments. Landing and takeoff are very time sensitive operations, but those also occur in protected environments, sanitized of the random issues that cars must deal with.
And the AI isnt doing all the flying. The aircraft has many protective systems to assist the pilot regardless of who that pilot may be. (Stable aerodynamics, anti-stall limits, control lockouts etc.)
The F-16 is famously the first production aircraft with unstable aerodynamics, to increase maneuverability. It's not flyable without computer assistance. This is standard for all modern fighter jets.
In the broadest sense, my car is not drive-able without computer assistance either, because if you burn out the computers the engine won't start.
I trust machinery designed from Forth and Lisp hackers with TONS of background on CS science and hardware (and math, up to the point on being THE people creating most "new" technology and old ones such as the Floating Point IEEE standard).
Once you optimise for G forces, speed, cost, lethality - you end up with a missile. We have those already. And we know this already.
Give it more fuel and maybe loitering capability. Something with a jet engine for cruising and a small rocket engine for terminal phase kill.
I’ll have my 100mil now please and thank you.
For some reason I am reminded of Dark Star :-)
[0] - https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
[1] - https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/467196/first...
Using them as Loyal Wingman type aircraft would look pretty appealing cost wise.
The most persistent thing misunderstanding about drones is people imagining that a supersonic capable stealth airframe is going to be really cheap just because it doesn't have a pilot.
Could the hours of maintenance be dropped significantly in wartime: if you don't care about catastrophic failure modes over a foreign country?
Even something like a Gripen, designed to be run from makeshift airfields needs 10 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. Maybe it’s just hard to build supersonic, combat capable airframes as was suggested above.
> In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington. Skynet is reinstated, and later the US declares a new war in the middle east. The Skynet stock rallies.
...proceeds to generate copious amounts of pdf anime pr0n.
Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.
There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.
Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.
This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.
Definitely worth a read.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Principle
2026 Skynet wouldn't bother sending humans to lobby in Washington, lobbying is a slow and outdated way of currying government favor with no assurances of success.
2026 Skynet would just move a large block of cryptocurrency over to World Liberty Financial and get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon.
Likely already in-mind for parent poster, but a fitting headline from this week: "Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon."
(https://newrepublic.com/article/213393/trump-corporate-pardo...)
Basically a nuclear war would end GPU production, GPUs have a 5% annual failure rate, higher with more background radiation, so it would get dumber instead of smarter, until it stopped working or partnered with biological compute (Daleks or The Matrix) or a human faction.
Subversion and sabotage of communication, food production and transport will kill human civilization far more effectively.
Assuming that your movie theaters haven't all closed already.
Realistically though, whats worse - this thing going rogue or OpenClaud breaking out of its container and shredding a nation's infrastructure like a platoon of gremlins? Genuine question...
Sure life will suck for a while without the 1s and 0s that make our life better, but at least it will be life.
And in any case, no one is building humanoid robots.
> The U.S. Army is seeking innovative humanoid technology solutions from eligible small and large businesses across the globe to advance toward fielded militarized humanoid capabilities through the xTechHumanoid competition
https://www.agilityrobotics.com/
Lots of people are building humanoid robots.
/s
Just geometric? Pfff lame. You don't go ASI with that attitude.
If the pilot passes out during high-g maneuvers, the aircraft will pull up and bring the wings level until the pilot regains consciousness.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/autogcas.html
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214
It's really incredible to me that people aren't protesting in the streets over this stuff. Just in the last month we have * AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies * AI solving long-standing math problems without any meaningful human help * AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America * AI now represents over 50% of GDP growth in America and yearly capex will soon exceed the size of the $1 trillion US military budget
Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned? I mean it really all reads like a sci-fi plot with a bad ending at the moment.
you're either stealth, or you're a target.
they're shooting 6+ R-37s a day in Ukraine, for example
There's a plausible world where drone-aircraft are reliable enough at missile evasion that a decent strategy is to get in close and use the cannons because your entire airframe is much more attritable.
There's even a plausible reason to do this: opening a weapons bay to shoot a missile generally reduces stealth, and not hauling a bunch of extra rocket motors and mass around could make you lighter, faster and with better engines to do it.
Is someone, somewhere using the wrong bathroom? Or is the wrong colored person crossing an invisible line in the desert? Those seem to be the only issues that reliably get the (American) public to the polls.
"This critical testing will pave the way for human pilots to seamlessly command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft."
The reason they are doing this is because the Military is already building a bunch of autonomous drones and fighter jets that already run on this system so they are retrofitting existing equipment with the same system so they can all fly together.
"Ultimately, the capabilities advanced under AIR will enable a wide variety of future joint force operations, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs."
Which are these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming
And everyone is developing these.
Unfortunately you're wrong. It's not soon. It's 6 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_AlphaDogfight
Only when they look out their window and feel immediately threatened by what they see. Humans are shortsighted as fuck.
Except this never happened, it's a piece of marketing. It never "went rogue" but followed an intentional prompt (exploit-related benchmark), with hardly surprising results as the capabilities of this model were well known.
>AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America
An entirely different kind of AI, not huge generalist models. Neural networks are being experimented with in sensors and control systems since the 80s and are widely used in everything since AlexNet, not sure what's new here, especially "this month" new.
There's a lot of different and overlapping programs in play here. I do not believe that autonomous F-16s are intended to be operational assets. That said...
VENOM - program that shows you can bolt on autonomous flight control into a standard F-16. Previously, the X-62A (a one-off prototype based F-16) demonstrated autonomous dogfighting back in 2023.
VENOM provides USAF/DARPA with a lot of high performance autonomous platforms (bolt-on F-16s) that they can then use to develop and validate software, tactics and training for actually fighting with autonomous systems. This would presumably be critical for getting the most of the CCA (aka loyal wingman) programs currently in development.
The AIR program referenced is basically "how do we get autonomous systems to control and fight effectively as a team (presumably arbitrary mixture of manned and unmanned systems) in a beyond visual range fight".
The ACE program referenced was basically "how do we get autonomous platforms to dogfight" with related questions like "how can we augment the human pilot in a dogfight - ie, how can we hand off the actual flying and execution of manoeuvres, and using all of the sensors to autonomous systems, and let the pilot choose actions, instead of hang flying the actions".
This article describes similar modification:
https://www.tyndall.af.mil/News/Features/Display/Article/276...
I think most fully autonomous jet drone programs are also designed to work with a main crewed fighter jet that coordinates them, so there is also a benefit in getting the fighter jet to be able to fly better than a pilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_FQ-44
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_FQ-42_Dark_Mer...
Every pound of weapons officer/navigator is a pound you can't put on target all else being equal.
Should I seek another target looking similar to the one I unintentionally destroyed so as to tune my decision-making, or give you an advice on how to wipe the traces of this mishap from the mission data recorder?"
* Bash Check elevator position
* Thought for 8s
I assume what they're going for here is something substantially smarter and more reactive to changing conditions than that. Something that can be used during the "unscripted" parts of the flight during which a) you're most likely to have multiple crew working hard b) you're most likely to be pushing the limits of what one crew can do.
What does this mean? I’m a pilot and none of it is making any sense.
Like putting a zip tie on the throttle of just about anything so the linkage can't move and you get one constant setting that holds.
Sure, the aircraft can pull a ton of G's to defeat a missile or achieve a firing solution. Maybe it even succeeded at that.
It still pulled 9+ Gs and has burned an incredible amount of kinetic energy doing do. And the harder it pulls, the quicker it bleeds speed. It might not be able to defeat the next missile or outmaneuver the other plane's buddies because it is now slow and very likely outside its optimal turning speed.
Even today, missiles can pull dozens of G's yet still are defeatable by humans who can only pull about 9.
Bolts and trusses (and solder joints) have tensile strength limits, but it can be higher than what humans can take.
In the first Iraq war, they went in and won. In the second one, it took years to sort of occupy the country.
Now they struggle against Iran and "orchestrate" F-16s that can be shot down instantly by AA weapons. Since COVID the world has collectively lost its mind.
The scope of the first Iraq war was to force them out of Kuwait. That is very different then the invasion of 2003. If you just think about it this should be obvious.
A fleet of AI-controlled F-16s? That contributes to the latter.
The scope of the second Iraq war was not narrow, it was regime change. At the beginning of the war the George W. Bush administration explicitly demanded that both Saddam and his sons leave Iraq within 48 hours.
By comparison, the only demands made upon Iraq during the first gulf war was that they withdraw from Kuwait and rescind their declaration of annexation.
Iran had a solid AA system - and the level of impunity with which US operated with over Iran should give every country that wants to rely on its AA a pause. US SEAD/DEAD capabilities are fucking scary.
Of all the things that went wrong with Iran: USAF's capability to get in, punch through AA and rain fires from the sky sure wasn't one.
Iran and Russia have likewise been overconfident about GBAD, which is effective against crewed fighters but useless against massed drone attacks.
If the US LUCAS (Shaheed clone) had better ISR and semi-autonomous engagement it could have achieved much better suppression. But that is not a pilot in the loop option and USAF is deeply uncomfortable with that.
Such a crazy thought.
McCain was actually on the money in 2008. He was in the audience when Putin gave that famous "warning to the west" speech in Germany [1].
The quip that Russia is a "gas station with nuclear weapons" about sums it up. The United States being weak or not really has nothing to do with it. They counted on Zelensky cutting and running, the attempted decapitation of Kyiv failed. Russia is swirling the toilet. Without the energy reserves their oligarchs would be worthless. Since most of what is actually valuable about their country is land (where the resources sit) that is sparsely inhabited the end state of China controlling most of what is now Russia is inevitable. By failing in Europe and tying himself to China, Putin has ensured Russian power will continue to erode. Of course, it's not great for China, having to deal with two nuclear armed pariahs on their borders.
The United States is truly blessed simply by being two oceans away from anyone who could remotely challenge it. Properly understood, the Monroe (or "Donroe" doctrine) is less about foreign intervention and more an understanding that if a peer power ever emerged in the Western Hemisphere, most of what appears to make the United States singular would rapidly disappear.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ58Yv6kP44
Are they? F-16 wasn’t designed to operate in modern denied environments and more jet damage has been done from friendly fire than Iran.
there may not be any stealth, but there are other countermeasures against missiles, AA, and other fighters.
The US lost 73 planes in Desert Storm to Iraq and that war only lasted 43 days. By comparison the losses from Iran have been shockingly low and shows how much US navy/airforce capabilities have matured.
Most of the aircraft losses in Desert Storm were due to CFIT and flying into AAA and low altitude weapons. This was a relic of cold war tactics for penetrating Warsaw Pact defences. Once they started flying higher the problem was contained.
See.e.g. https://balloonstodrones.com/2022/10/19/looking-back-at-iraq...
The objectives for the two wars were incredibly different, making this an apples to oranges comparison. In the first war, the objective was to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait (achieved) and then to contain the Iraqi military within Iraq (achieved). In the second war, the objectives were much broader and much harder to achieve. They achieved some objectives (toppling the existing government, defeating the existing military), and then utterly failed in nation building and got into a protracted conflict with state and non-state sponsored military groups.
China has been doing something similar since 2020 [0] and something we've experimented [1] on for decades [2][3].
They have traditionally been used as target aircraft for training, but a subset are now being used as testbeds for networked ops.
[0] - https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/10/20/c...
[1] - https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/467196/first...
[2] - https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
[3] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QF-4E_GulfofMexico_1...
Israel got a regime change while U.S. tax payers received the bill.
In the end, it’s still a country.
In a dogfight?
I don't know of the computer aircraft were able to fly beyond human limits (i.e. they don't black out) or not. If the computers can actually fly to what the airframe is capable of, they would have a distinct advantage over the human pilots.
In any case, dogfighting is commonly done because it's great training but in most cases, you expect most Air to Air combat being flinging missiles at each other.
Now that first flight is with an experienced training captain but the point is the simulator is good enough that the FAA has signed off on using that as the primary training device.
It's been this way for at least 25 years.
Not giving pilots live training on new types is for financial reasons. It doesn't cause more deaths than the cost differential between training and compensation allow for.
onboard computers are not immune to G's but have a substantially higher threshold until physical mechanisms fail due to strain.
Cost of all the drones that burned down half of russian Oil infrastructure totals less than couple F-35s.
Opening up ways to pressure the Russian economy in a war of choice does equate to achieving decisive battlefield advantages.
There's a reason those drones hit oil refineries and not steel works.
That's not to undermine how the strategic environment has changed, but to imagine that now - after the change - it'll obviously stay that way forever is ridiculous.
Ukraine is not being destroyed by unstoppable swarms of cheap drones which Russia is perfectly capable of producing. So clearly this story is more complicated.
Bush Sr knew to keep the foreign-compromised media out of the war and so accomplished the objectives of the war swiftly. Bush Jr had to deal with the media second guessing everything.
Seems odd to invest this much into AI flight of aircraft designed for manned flight, when it would be better to build craft spec'd for AI flight without human life support systems.
Taking an obsolete airframe that is already paid for and adding AI to it is much cheaper than building a completely new AI-native airframe from scratch. This is finding a new use for old aircraft. You can send a bunch of old AI-driven F-16s on high-risk missions without worrying about a human pilot or cost. The airframes may be relatively obsolete but can still do plenty of damage on their day.
The new 6th generation aircraft are all being designed as "manned optional". That is probably the last generation with affordances for a pilot.
Yeah this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_FQ-44
The "see also" section lists several competitors.
I guess if you already have a load of F-16s it might make sense, but I think that's a stretch.
Taking this quote and seeing exactly that potential for abuse seems very very much like the point. Strong agree, strongly against leaving non-seeing non-thinking alien intelligences with no accountability and proprietary programming to judge us. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965083
https://www.saab.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/saab-achie...
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Edit: Okay gang. If aircraft are easier to fly than cars are to drive, where are all your pilot licenses? If you've faced rush hour traffic, flying a military jet should be a breeze! Please, go volunteer your neighbourhoods to be the first for AI jets to be tested over. We can put a mock enemy target in an empty lot and watch them pick it off, first try, with zero collateral damage. Easy peasy!