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.

ref: https://youtu.be/4DQsG3TKQ0I?t=29

No worries, these will all be controlled by AIs sitting in orbiting data centers part of the Starlink constellation.

And in any case, no one is building humanoid robots.

Ha - this was the first thing that came to mind. I read this in Arnold's voice.

I find it quite sombre to see this comment from a peson with that handle.

This whole AI hype is such a convenient cover for the decisions of the 0.001%

That's not precisely how I remember that quote... But it's on the Internet, so my memory must be faulty.

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

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.

What are you talking about, Iraq fell in a month not years.

Are dogfights still relevant? Isn't it mostly shooting missiles outside of visual range these days?

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."

Which are these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming

And everyone is developing these.

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.

> I'm sure they will soon find that AI pilots defeat human ones in dogfights 100% of the time,

Unfortunately you're wrong. It's not soon. It's 6 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_AlphaDogfight

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.

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".

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.

Drones have human operators. This is a murderbot.

It's a step on from the F-16 flight simulator AI competition in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_AlphaDogfight