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The more interesting result comes when you combine AI in a jet with : () Not needing 2-5 years of expensive training. () not needing space for the human and it

The more interesting result comes when you combine AI in a jet with : () Not needing 2-5 years of expensive training. () not needing space for the human and it's associated safety systems (*) being completely willing to sacrifice the aircraft to "win" an encounter or otherwise achieve it's goals. In other words, an air force does not need AI that can completely dominate human pilots. It simply needs AI that is "mostly similar in performance", and when combined the advantages mentioned above, means that such aircraft will be significantly better in terms of fighting capability. Of course, that is just raw combat, not other areas of flight where greater human intelligence is of more value.

LanceH 6y ago
AI can also fly past black/red out thresholds. Even in current aircraft that would be add capability. But having that in the design phase may open up all sorts of possibilities.
- fatbird 6y ago
  I'm sure someone in these programs has speculated what air combat would look like between AIs where body-based thresholds are removed and machine learning has developed new tactics that are only applicable in a pure AI arena. I'd be really interested in seeing those speculations.
  - AnotherGoodName 6y ago
    I can't help but think a drone aircraft is essentially the same as a guided missile except the exploding pieces are modular rather than exploding itself and thus the majority of it is re-usable. We already shoot missiles at other missiles. Drones will make that cheaper. In other words i think the biggest change will be in the economics of war. War will become much cheaper in the same way SpaceX's reusable rockets made space travel much cheaper.
    - mNovak 6y ago
      I agree war will become a numbers game even moreso than it already is, by taking out the 'incalculable' losses of human life on both sides of an engagement. But modern combat systems are definitely not cheap!
    - msla 6y ago
      So the enemy's goal is to convince people on our side that using drones in combat is utterly beyond the pale, something only a monster would do. This prevents them from being developed, lest the military feel severe backlash even from within its own ranks, and ensures we're committed to human-flown craft while the enemy gets to field drones.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        Just because drones make sense in a war between nations doesn't mean they can't be abused by governments against civilians. There is no shortage of governments that attacked their own citizens and with drones it becomes even easier.
      - salawat 6y ago
        ...it's not the enemy, it's anyone with any appreciation for the physical forces to which a warfighting machine is subject, and the economic factors at play that make production of those systems as disastrous to the nation employing them as not doing anything at all. Keep in mind, a large contribution to the collapse of the USSR was the incredible financial strain created by defense spending in response to the Star Wars defense system initiative. It was an economic victory for the U.S. more than anything else. There is always a balance. It's just like the hoopla over hypersonic cruise weapons. Sounds horrifying. Until you realize the trumpet bell makes countering them easier rather than harder as long as you detect them early, because there is simply no way to reorient quickly at those speeds without being torn apart. Further, no one is saying we should stick with manned fighter craft, only that they won't likely be the silver bullet everyone seems to think they will be, will be fraught with their own weaknesses, may not in the long run be cheaper than man operated, and may Coe with unforeseen doctrinal changes as the enemy adapts. War is complicated, and rarely does who has the cooler gun perfectly translate to who wins or loses.
  - ThrustVectoring 6y ago
    I'd honestly be quite surprised if AI research discovers novel and useful dogfight tactics. The interplay between speed, height, position, and direction has been pretty thoroughly mined for ideas, there's been little in terms of updates since Boyd's 1964 Aerial Attack Study (I found a copy at http://oplaunch.com/resources/aerial-attack-study-1964.pdf http://oplaunch.com/resources/aerial-attack-study-1964.pdf if you're curious)
    - jrd259 6y ago
      Then again, the AI system Eurisko won the Trillon Credit Squadron game twice in a row, each time with novel strategies. You might say that dogfighting is more constrained by laws of physics we already know, and so this won't happen. But wouldn't you hate to be proven wrong?
    - jeffshek 6y ago
      I would bet the inverse. If the majority of tactics is spearheaded by one person from 1964 - that probably means there's a lot of innovation. I found reading Boyd's biography, so much effort was made before decision makers would use his tactics, even when they were clearly superior. Even board game like Go and Chess have experienced new and novel tactics from AI despite being much older, with lower barriers to entry. Inversely, dogfighting is new and the barriers to entry are so high its unlikely its close to optimal.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    If that's true then why has nobody invented a missile that is equipped with a metal storm [0] as its warhead? [0] https://youtu.be/wKlnMwuCZso https://youtu.be/wKlnMwuCZso
- woeirua 6y ago
  Probably not as much as you would think. Modern airframes are still not capable of sustaining as much acceleration as missiles. You just can't outmaneuver today's missiles.
  - solotronics 6y ago
    maybe this would lead to smart missiles or a platform to launch them that can loiter near the battlefield, directed by a pilot or controller nearby
    - nradov 6y ago
      Smart loitering munitions already exist.
      - salawat 6y ago
        Loitering in the sense of expending fuel load until a hypothetical target arrives? Or loitering in the sense it's there for reconissance and isn't intended to directly destructively interact with the target? There's a big difference between a Predator with Hellfires, a tomahawk, A Global Hawk, or a man portablerecon/kamikaze drone, and finally Project Pluto, the ultimate "F you" device likely ever contemplated.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - mullingitover 6y ago
    > Modern airframes are still not capable of sustaining as much acceleration as missiles. Are those limits what they are because there wasn't any point in designing stronger airframes if the pilot was just going to black out under higher G forces? If you take the vulnerable human body out of the equation I wonder if airframes strong enough to withstand that acceleration would actually be feasible.
    - berkut 6y ago
- sandworm101 6y ago
  High-G tolerance is not a dogfighting panacea. Even without the pilot, there are issues when you want to take a large aircraft into 10+g range. Structural strength is one thing but there are also aerodynamic limits. The higher the G the higher the stall speed. Superhuman or AI, trying to pull 10g in thin air will result in flow separation (ie stall) and departure from controlled flight... ie you lose control and drop like a rock. Missiles don't care about stalling. They are on a suicide mission to get as close to the target as possible for the nanoseconds necessary to detonate. Missiles, being small and dense, are much stronger than any aircraft.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Pilots do black out during high G maneuvers and the planes seem to be fine, so this is already a limitation for a human+plane combo that a plane alone would not have.
    - stouset 6y ago
      Planes generally can't pull more Gs than the humans inside without needing to go through an extensive maintenance process. Even then, as has been said countless times in this thread, high-G maneuvers don't do shit against modern missile threats. They might be useful for dogfighting with guns, but given the range and accuracy of modern missiles, combined with proximity fuzes, it simply doesn't accomplish much. Against a weaker enemy, you'll never have the need to pull Gs in the first place. Against an equal or stronger enemy, it won't do a damn bit of difference anyway.
      - burfog 6y ago
        Dogfighting with guns is a great way to stop an incoming missile. You just need the ability to do high-G maneuvers and aim well. Shoot the missile. It helps that bullets as small as 12.7mm can be steered.
        stouset 6y ago
        This comment is so far into Poe's law territory, I'm past the ability to tell if I'm being trolled or not. In case I'm not being trolled: the way to defeat a radar-guided missile is to beam (fly perpendicular to) the radar source. For an missile with active or semi-active radar guidance, this means you need to fly perpendicular to it. And, preferably, fire lots of chaff. This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of flying straight at the missile trying to shoot it with guns. Head-on, a missile will close the last mile in under one second. During this second, you need to accurately track, predict the flight path of, and reliably put guns onto a target that's cold (all the fuel has been burnt) and has (in the case of an AMRAAM) a 7 inch diameter. And that very well may not even care about being shot up with bullets; at best, I think you'd kill the seeker, but within the last mile it's not changing course much to have to come close enough to kill you by the proximity fuze (of which I believe there are two, one in the nose and one in the tail). By the time the first of your slow-moving bullets has any shot of reaching it, it will easily be within a quarter of a mile. This is not even a remotely plausible way to defeat an oncoming missile. It runs directly counter to the actions you already be taking to maximize your chance of survival. And on top of that, bullets are only going to damage the leading-edge parts of the missile which aren't particularly critical to its ability to kill you, at least not within the distance it will be by the time your hail-mary bullet salvo hits it.
a254613e 6y ago
With perhaps the exception of the training, wouldn't most of those problems (and some other ones mentioned in this thread) be something that can be solved using remote controlled, but still controlled by humans, fighter jets? There must be a reason that I'm missing why this isn't already a thing, anyone got an idea?
- notatoad 6y ago
  gamers worry about the latency of a wireless controller sending a signal from their couch to their TV. for a fighter jet with a remote pilot, you're looking potentially hundreds of miles of range, and the latency of the video transmission to the pilot combined with the latency of the controls signal back to the plane. i can't imagine that being acceptable for any sort of dogfighting scenario.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Ironically, game controllers can have a latency of more than 20ms. Light travels more than 6000 km in a vacuum in 20ms. That's a pretty good excuse for gamers to complain about that sort of latency, I think.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Bluetooth is bad enough that videos have to be delayed so that audio can catch up. Completely worthless for games unless you use proprietary codecs like aptX.
      - MayeulC 6y ago
        I wouldn't say it's that bad, I flew a drone controlled via bluetooth with my phone, for instance. Buffering audio is actually a great answer to disconnections. Plus, it's less energy-intensive to fill the buffers at once than to stream it as needed. And since it's pre-recorded anyway, you already have the whole buffer. Yes, initial transfer can take a while, though. But in theory, the play/pause operations shouldn't have latency, and the bluetooth device could clearly communicate its state. I'm not sure how audio is actually implemented in the bluetooth stack, though, I've only ever done serial communication with it.
jdmichal 6y ago
In the context of dogfights, why do you even need an aircraft at that point? A swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones with a kamikaze AI sounds like the end of human-piloted warplanes to me.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  I don't think dogfights are the future of air-to-air combat. > A swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones with a kamikaze AI sounds like the end of human-piloted warplanes to me. This already exists. We just call them surface to air missiles or air-to-air missiles. Modern air superiority combat is point-and-click. Send your air superiority fighter over, shoot a missile from beyond the sensor range of the other craft, and then blow them up. ---------- Air support fighters need guns (see A10 warthog) and other ammunition. But will we really be using guns in the future of air to air combat?
  - bob33212 6y ago
    Runways, SAM Sites, Fuel Depots are hit at the same time. You gain air superiority very quickly
    - dragontamer 6y ago
      Bombarding the opponent with rockets and artillery usually wins. We've been doing that for decades. The issue is that advanced opponents (ie: Russia or China) will have air defense of their own. How do you expect to take down a SAM site? Its specifically designed to destroy air targets as they approach. With what, with air-drones? Against a hardened anti-air specialty base? This is where electronic warfare comes in handy: "jamming" the radar of a SAM site for example will blindfold them. But the battle of information (jamming, stealth, and advanced radar) is constant, there's no guarantee that your jamming or stealth technology will be good enough for the next generation of Radar. And no. You don't approach a SAM site (or any area a SAM site is defending) from the air. US Patriot systems can take out SCUD missiles traveling at Mach 5. And if your "kamikaze drones" are flying at Mach 5 with an explosive payload, that makes them effectively a SCUD missile.
Justsignedup 6y ago
I think the issue is going to be that the AI can pull G-forces higher than what a human can do and also never having to be re-trained. This means a swarm of "cheap" craft that focus on deploy 20 to take anything out is going to be the optimal. And without the need for all those human systems (glass cockpit, AR consoles, ejection systems, seats, etc) we're good. For non-combat operations they can be flown similarly to drones.
- fatbird 6y ago
  I'm not sure they wouldn't require retraining. If all the pilots are AIs, the tactics would change, necessitating retraining. Then there would be the search for better AI tactics. You'd still be in a position of a tactics race, driven by simulation and machine learning probably, so the evolutions would iterate faster, and the deciding factor would become the computing power each air force could throw at it.
tomohawk 6y ago
Say you're the president of Elbonia, and you get a report that an unidentified aircraft is in your airspace. Without a human pilot in a fast jet, how do you get up there to take a closer look at the situation to decide what to do? Modern warfare is limited in nature, with rules of engagement, etc. Iran just shot down an airliner because they had poor ROE and control of their systems. Just because something looks like a threat on sensors does not mean it is a threat. It could be that natural phenomena are masking things. It could be a ruse, such as an adversary is disguising a civilian aircraft to look military, or vice versa. This result with dogfighting is interesting, but is only a very small part of what fast jets are useful for.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  What about cameras?
- 1024core 6y ago
  > Iran just shot down an airliner because they had poor ROE and control of their systems. So did the USS Vincennes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
stevehawk 6y ago
pilots don't really take up as much space on these planes as you'd think. these planes are huge. the F22 is over sixty feet long. if you replaced the pilot, controls and screens, weight wise you might get to carry one more AAMRAM, but that sucker is twelve feet long.
- knute 6y ago
  These are large aircraft (though the F-16 is significantly smaller than an F-22) but the pilot + ejection seat + airtight pressurized compartment + life support systems + displays and controls really starts to add up in both the mass and volume budgets. But the pilot requires more design compromises. The requirement to have a large canopy protruding from the fuselage for maximum visibility is a challenge to both building a stealthy aircraft and aerodynamics. Also, currently the pilot and their circulatory system keeps aircraft from turning at more than ~9G (and then only for brief periods of time). Without a pilot, it would be possible to build aircraft with stunning maneuverability.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The maneuverability thing is mostly a myth. Sure it's theoretically possible to build a drone that can turn at >9G. But it won't have sufficient thrust to sustain that rate of turn without losing a lot of energy. And now the airframe has to be stronger to handle the stress, which means heavier, and that compromises mission effectiveness in other ways. And for all that it still wouldn't be able to out maneuver a missile in most realistic conditions. A better option would probably be to design drones that are less maneuverable. Sure more will be shot down. But that will lower the price so just manufacture more.
    - stouset 6y ago
      Following that logic to its conclusion, you could save a lot of money by skipping out on the fuel and carrying capacity to make it back home. Another commenter said it first, but pretty much any set of reasoning that gets you to autonomous drones eventually leads to simply making guided missiles.
gibolt 6y ago
AI can run the show locally, with a remote operator making the actionable decisions. Military drones already operate this way, without much onboard smarts. Not something I'm excited about, but likely inevitable.
puranjay 6y ago
I would imagine a human-less plane would also be able to pull off manuvers that might be too stressful for the human body to handle.
- umvi 6y ago
  Right, humans can only handle 9Gs, I see no reason why removing the human wouldn't allow pulling way more Gs
jacobr1 6y ago
Also it isn't an either/or type situation. You can have both. The Air Force is working on "Loyal Wingman" where you can have a squadron with a manned system helping strategically target and direct their "unmanned wingmen" ai based planes.
asdff 6y ago
Would you even need a good AI or equipment to be sufficiently disruptive? I imagine a swarm of crudely moving, low cost drones would win most encounters with more complicated targets. This feels like a boon to smaller nations who can quickly gain an edge by capitalizing on existing research.
laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago
(works both ways) and the enemy doesn't need to beat the AI in dogfight, just the infinite side channel attacks on the training set. WW3 might be won by adding a few high intensity LEDs to some old MIGs. https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-outsmart-facial-recognition-tech-2019-10#a-dutch-design-student-invented-a-projector-that-superimposes-an-image-of-a-different-face-over-that-of-the-wearer-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-out...
- lumost 6y ago
  this is a tough one, to make an exploitable attack you would need at a minimum to have a copy of the flight AI and be able to simulate possible encounters. Given the relatively finite number of side-channels available, it's probably far cheaper for the AI builder to run such simulations and adversarially test against the main exploitable variations such as blasting the aircraft's sensors with bad/confusing data. There just aren't that many methods of interacting with a plane >1km away, and even fewer at the 50-100KM ranges that modern fighters are built to fight at.
  - godelski 6y ago
    > to make an exploitable attack you would need at a minimum to have a copy of the flight AI and be able to simulate possible encounters. I'd disagree. Data is more important than the model. But also you can do black box attacks on AI pretty effectively. What you do is train your AI to perform a similar feat and then figure out its weaknesses. Those weaknesses are likely to translate to the other AI. Robustness is a difficult task. As for blasting confusing data, well that already happens to human pilots. There are radar jammers, targeting jammers, visually occluding devices, etc. But hey, if an AI can operate under 90% of typical dog fight situations, then that's a big reduction in needed pilots. Then those pilots can be all trained to be aces.
    - johbjo 6y ago
      If weaknesses can be known in advance, then they can "just" be incorporated into the training environment. Unless you can feed the sensors "false" data, there aren't necessarily that many possible exploits.
georgeecollins 6y ago
Or mixed in with human pilots as a force multiplier. I think that is how they will start being used, so that there is always a human observer. At the start.
pulkitsh1234 6y ago
Wouldn't that make the jet just a fancy missile ?
cwkoss 6y ago
Also, higher maximum G limit. AIs should be inherently much more maneuverable that human pilots because humans can only pull -1 to 9 Gs, AI would only be limited by the aircraft itself.
- stouset 6y ago
  This is of marginal value. Pulling Gs might help you in a close-in dogfight, but when your primary threat is a radar-guided air-air missile at 75mi+ or a SAM site at 200mi+ of range, Gs don't really matter unless you've failed multiple other possible means of defeating the incoming missile. And even in this case, high Gs aren't going to be much more than a hail mary.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    Of course it will- autonomous aircraft that can zigzag to counter threats.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      But nowhere near as fast as a missile that weighs 1% and has a much higher power-to-weight ratio.
    - stouset 6y ago
      No, that's not even remotely close to how aircraft defeat modern radar-guided or even heat-seeking missiles. Even when you take the fleshy bits on the inside of the plane out of the equation, a plane that's capable of carrying multiple missiles and/or bombs is simply not going to be able to out-turn a missile that can pull 50G+ approaching at Mach 4 with any sort of regularity. Pulling hard Gs is all but pointless because even if you cause the missile to "miss", the missile doesn't care about actually impacting you. They're proximity-fuzed and will happily detonate right next to you instead.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
        Didn't say that's how modern aircraft do it. They dont. I envisioned future drone aircraft that behave like an aircraft and missile hybrid with a smaller radar cross section. A large part of getting a missile to target is predicting where the target will be. Zig zagging hard and rapidly ruins the prediction and you don't have to do it all the time- only when it knows it's illuminated.
deleted 6y ago
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virtue3 6y ago
I think what we're actually going to see is something like assistant drones that go with the pilot. So using the f35 as a command&control system to give orders to the ai drones. And/or just have them backthem up in combat anyway. The issue with AI is that combat can change so quickly. It's hard to make the right calls. Let the AI handle Air to Air defense while the human pilots take out what targets they can read by their discretion etc.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  This is explicitly part of the plan for the f35. It also frees up the drones from having to carry sensor equipment, and lets all of the drones benefit from a single sensor suite too heavy for the drones themselves to carry.
jacquesm 6y ago
Not to mention those pesky G-Force limits that humans are subject to. They black out long before aircraft has reached its limits.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  I'm almost excited to blow another hundred billion dollars on designing a next-gen aircraft without any G-Force considerations. Current jets designed around a human pilot can already achieve mind-boggling performance of over 10G on multiple axes, what would a blank slate aircraft with none of those limitations be able to do?
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Not that much more, but you'll be able to control the aircraft at all times because the 'pilot' doesn't black out in high-G situations. Maybe save a little bit of weight, smaller radar cross section.
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      You don't think there'd be a bunch of compounding design decisions available to engineers? Pilots currently black out in high G situations so the flying envelope is basically constrained to acceleration / turning radii that are at the edges of pilot abilities. Sure if you removed the pilot in current planes, you'd be able to hit the extremes of that envelope, but if you were to redesign it without ever thinking of a physical pilot, you could have a much wider envelope. What would they be capable of? Something like this but with a ~full-size airplane: https://youtu.be/AXSfFLGeVZA?t=53 https://youtu.be/AXSfFLGeVZA?t=53
iphone_elegance 6y ago
Going to be crazy when nations steal eachothers piloting AIs
Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
I think that days of big expensive aircraft like modern fighters / bombers are numbered. They will likely be replaced with a swarm of drones, which are smaller, cheaper and harder to detect. For $100M (the price of just one fighter) you can field 10000 cheap drones and literally blot out the sun over the field of battle.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Complemented, and AI-piloted, but not replaced. There are significant positive scale factors in aerodynamics. Larger jets have much better thrust to weight ratios, allowing them to move faster, travel further, maneuver better, and carry heavier and longer ranged weapons and sensor platforms. Light drones and big expensive aircraft will both exist in the future and play separate roles. They also won't interact much, aside from a fighter group spearheading a drone group. A drone swarm is too diffuse to be a worthwhile target for a fighter's weapons, but a fighter is too fast to be engaged by a drone swarm. Air battles of the future will likely be conceptually similar to air battles today, but with light drones replacing bombers with guided bombs. An initial wave of fighters will contest air superiority. If they achieve it they will use it to launch long-range attacks to disable a small number of anti-drone hard points. Once the way is clear a wave of smaller, slower drones can swarm in and bomb a large number of targets with precision.
  - taneq 6y ago
    Bigger fighters definitely still have a place, but I'm not sure manned ones do. Imagine a dogfight between a manned fighter jet with a maximum G limit of 15G and an AI fighter jet with a limit of 30G - it won't even be close.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      I said AI-piloted in the first sentence.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      To add another response, (a) dogfighting is not something 5th+ gen fighters need to be good at and (b) no fighter is ever going to tolerate 30G in anything except maybe a straight line. Fighters are big and have big shear stresses and would tear apart long before then.
stefco_ 6y ago
Also not being limited by G-forces or endurance.
hnick 6y ago
> Not needing 2-5 years of expensive training. It doesn't stop there. You train one AI, you've trained them all. A minor performance increase instantly upgrades the capability of your entire fleet. An AI that can learn from real world situations will likewise convey that learning to your entire fleet instantly. They say smart people learn from the mistakes of others, but we often have some trouble applying this. An AI should do better. Of course, the corollary is that bugs will affect your entire fleet. I wonder if a future cyber-security role will be to look for AI blindspots to exploit en masse without prior warning (like flying with the sun behind you, but more arcane).
- meowface 6y ago
  The absolute worst case scenario would be somehow tricking the AI or taking control from it so jets start attacking/kamikaze-ing their own side en masse. I suppose this is theoretically already a risk for some UAVs and perhaps even some advanced human-piloted jets, but a hijacked autonomous fleet would be a wild sight to see. No doubt some organizations are researching how to perform and defend against things like that. The future of asymmetric warfare in particular could get really crazy.
  - TheMightyLlama 6y ago
    If I’m approaching an AI equipped force with my own AI force I’m driven to think about the ‘meta game’. In this context I would sacrifice multiple aircraft to ‘taint my the enemies training data with solutions which are a disadvantage in a future fight scenario.
    - meowface 6y ago
      Good point, but the meta will surely be played by the other side, too. They'll expect that their enemies will want to try to "obfuscate" their true operations to confuse things that have been trained to recognize and predict certain actions. That's why this probably won't actually be in use for many decades. You need something a bit closer to AGI than what exists now. Until then, you'll probably have limited use cases, maybe where movement and obstacle avoidance are autonomous but everything else is programmed or remotely controlled. You could imagine small, agile flying assassination drones which can navigate cities and houses to kill targets with short-range projectiles. Very Black Mirror-esque, but far more ethical than the current approach of Call of Duty 4-style blowing up a big patch of land from the clouds with a Hellfire missile, including all the civilians in proximity.
Aeolun 6y ago
Not having a squishy human in the machine makes doing a lot of crazy maneuvers a lot more doable.
dkersten 6y ago
> Of course, that is just raw combat, not other areas of flight where greater human intelligence is of more value. You don‘t need the AI to replace every plane or pilot, you could have a traditional plane and pilot to do all the human things and an AI or two to protect the human or engage the targets. Mixed AI/human squadrons.
rtkwe 6y ago
The biggest advantage I bet (in a real AI fighter) is removing the person from the cockpit. Modern jets have been able to fly harder than humans can reliably stand for a while, being able to pull higher Gs means tighter turns. The real question is how much does gun dogfighting ability matter now because guns are almost vestigial on modern fighters. Dogfights now are missile affairs and this test was a gun based one. https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-pilot-f-35-can-excel-dogfighting-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-pilot-f-35-can-excel-dog...

LanceH 6y ago

AI can also fly past black/red out thresholds. Even in current aircraft that would be add capability. But having that in the design phase may open up all sorts of possibilities.

fatbird 6y ago
I'm sure someone in these programs has speculated what air combat would look like between AIs where body-based thresholds are removed and machine learning has developed new tactics that are only applicable in a pure AI arena. I'd be really interested in seeing those speculations.
- AnotherGoodName 6y ago
  I can't help but think a drone aircraft is essentially the same as a guided missile except the exploding pieces are modular rather than exploding itself and thus the majority of it is re-usable. We already shoot missiles at other missiles. Drones will make that cheaper. In other words i think the biggest change will be in the economics of war. War will become much cheaper in the same way SpaceX's reusable rockets made space travel much cheaper.
  - mNovak 6y ago
    I agree war will become a numbers game even moreso than it already is, by taking out the 'incalculable' losses of human life on both sides of an engagement. But modern combat systems are definitely not cheap!
  - msla 6y ago
    So the enemy's goal is to convince people on our side that using drones in combat is utterly beyond the pale, something only a monster would do. This prevents them from being developed, lest the military feel severe backlash even from within its own ranks, and ensures we're committed to human-flown craft while the enemy gets to field drones.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Just because drones make sense in a war between nations doesn't mean they can't be abused by governments against civilians. There is no shortage of governments that attacked their own citizens and with drones it becomes even easier.
    - salawat 6y ago
      ...it's not the enemy, it's anyone with any appreciation for the physical forces to which a warfighting machine is subject, and the economic factors at play that make production of those systems as disastrous to the nation employing them as not doing anything at all. Keep in mind, a large contribution to the collapse of the USSR was the incredible financial strain created by defense spending in response to the Star Wars defense system initiative. It was an economic victory for the U.S. more than anything else. There is always a balance. It's just like the hoopla over hypersonic cruise weapons. Sounds horrifying. Until you realize the trumpet bell makes countering them easier rather than harder as long as you detect them early, because there is simply no way to reorient quickly at those speeds without being torn apart. Further, no one is saying we should stick with manned fighter craft, only that they won't likely be the silver bullet everyone seems to think they will be, will be fraught with their own weaknesses, may not in the long run be cheaper than man operated, and may Coe with unforeseen doctrinal changes as the enemy adapts. War is complicated, and rarely does who has the cooler gun perfectly translate to who wins or loses.
- ThrustVectoring 6y ago
  I'd honestly be quite surprised if AI research discovers novel and useful dogfight tactics. The interplay between speed, height, position, and direction has been pretty thoroughly mined for ideas, there's been little in terms of updates since Boyd's 1964 Aerial Attack Study (I found a copy at http://oplaunch.com/resources/aerial-attack-study-1964.pdf http://oplaunch.com/resources/aerial-attack-study-1964.pdf if you're curious)
  - jrd259 6y ago
    Then again, the AI system Eurisko won the Trillon Credit Squadron game twice in a row, each time with novel strategies. You might say that dogfighting is more constrained by laws of physics we already know, and so this won't happen. But wouldn't you hate to be proven wrong?
  - jeffshek 6y ago
    I would bet the inverse. If the majority of tactics is spearheaded by one person from 1964 - that probably means there's a lot of innovation. I found reading Boyd's biography, so much effort was made before decision makers would use his tactics, even when they were clearly superior. Even board game like Go and Chess have experienced new and novel tactics from AI despite being much older, with lower barriers to entry. Inversely, dogfighting is new and the barriers to entry are so high its unlikely its close to optimal.
- imtringued 6y ago
  If that's true then why has nobody invented a missile that is equipped with a metal storm [0] as its warhead? [0] https://youtu.be/wKlnMwuCZso https://youtu.be/wKlnMwuCZso
woeirua 6y ago
Probably not as much as you would think. Modern airframes are still not capable of sustaining as much acceleration as missiles. You just can't outmaneuver today's missiles.
- solotronics 6y ago
  maybe this would lead to smart missiles or a platform to launch them that can loiter near the battlefield, directed by a pilot or controller nearby
  - nradov 6y ago
    Smart loitering munitions already exist.
    - salawat 6y ago
      Loitering in the sense of expending fuel load until a hypothetical target arrives? Or loitering in the sense it's there for reconissance and isn't intended to directly destructively interact with the target? There's a big difference between a Predator with Hellfires, a tomahawk, A Global Hawk, or a man portablerecon/kamikaze drone, and finally Project Pluto, the ultimate "F you" device likely ever contemplated.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mullingitover 6y ago
  > Modern airframes are still not capable of sustaining as much acceleration as missiles. Are those limits what they are because there wasn't any point in designing stronger airframes if the pilot was just going to black out under higher G forces? If you take the vulnerable human body out of the equation I wonder if airframes strong enough to withstand that acceleration would actually be feasible.
  - berkut 6y ago
sandworm101 6y ago
High-G tolerance is not a dogfighting panacea. Even without the pilot, there are issues when you want to take a large aircraft into 10+g range. Structural strength is one thing but there are also aerodynamic limits. The higher the G the higher the stall speed. Superhuman or AI, trying to pull 10g in thin air will result in flow separation (ie stall) and departure from controlled flight... ie you lose control and drop like a rock. Missiles don't care about stalling. They are on a suicide mission to get as close to the target as possible for the nanoseconds necessary to detonate. Missiles, being small and dense, are much stronger than any aircraft.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Pilots do black out during high G maneuvers and the planes seem to be fine, so this is already a limitation for a human+plane combo that a plane alone would not have.
  - stouset 6y ago
    Planes generally can't pull more Gs than the humans inside without needing to go through an extensive maintenance process. Even then, as has been said countless times in this thread, high-G maneuvers don't do shit against modern missile threats. They might be useful for dogfighting with guns, but given the range and accuracy of modern missiles, combined with proximity fuzes, it simply doesn't accomplish much. Against a weaker enemy, you'll never have the need to pull Gs in the first place. Against an equal or stronger enemy, it won't do a damn bit of difference anyway.
    - burfog 6y ago
      Dogfighting with guns is a great way to stop an incoming missile. You just need the ability to do high-G maneuvers and aim well. Shoot the missile. It helps that bullets as small as 12.7mm can be steered.
      - stouset 6y ago
        This comment is so far into Poe's law territory, I'm past the ability to tell if I'm being trolled or not. In case I'm not being trolled: the way to defeat a radar-guided missile is to beam (fly perpendicular to) the radar source. For an missile with active or semi-active radar guidance, this means you need to fly perpendicular to it. And, preferably, fire lots of chaff. This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of flying straight at the missile trying to shoot it with guns. Head-on, a missile will close the last mile in under one second. During this second, you need to accurately track, predict the flight path of, and reliably put guns onto a target that's cold (all the fuel has been burnt) and has (in the case of an AMRAAM) a 7 inch diameter. And that very well may not even care about being shot up with bullets; at best, I think you'd kill the seeker, but within the last mile it's not changing course much to have to come close enough to kill you by the proximity fuze (of which I believe there are two, one in the nose and one in the tail). By the time the first of your slow-moving bullets has any shot of reaching it, it will easily be within a quarter of a mile. This is not even a remotely plausible way to defeat an oncoming missile. It runs directly counter to the actions you already be taking to maximize your chance of survival. And on top of that, bullets are only going to damage the leading-edge parts of the missile which aren't particularly critical to its ability to kill you, at least not within the distance it will be by the time your hail-mary bullet salvo hits it.

a254613e 6y ago

With perhaps the exception of the training, wouldn't most of those problems (and some other ones mentioned in this thread) be something that can be solved using remote controlled, but still controlled by humans, fighter jets? There must be a reason that I'm missing why this isn't already a thing, anyone got an idea?

notatoad 6y ago
gamers worry about the latency of a wireless controller sending a signal from their couch to their TV. for a fighter jet with a remote pilot, you're looking potentially hundreds of miles of range, and the latency of the video transmission to the pilot combined with the latency of the controls signal back to the plane. i can't imagine that being acceptable for any sort of dogfighting scenario.
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Ironically, game controllers can have a latency of more than 20ms. Light travels more than 6000 km in a vacuum in 20ms. That's a pretty good excuse for gamers to complain about that sort of latency, I think.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Bluetooth is bad enough that videos have to be delayed so that audio can catch up. Completely worthless for games unless you use proprietary codecs like aptX.
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      I wouldn't say it's that bad, I flew a drone controlled via bluetooth with my phone, for instance. Buffering audio is actually a great answer to disconnections. Plus, it's less energy-intensive to fill the buffers at once than to stream it as needed. And since it's pre-recorded anyway, you already have the whole buffer. Yes, initial transfer can take a while, though. But in theory, the play/pause operations shouldn't have latency, and the bluetooth device could clearly communicate its state. I'm not sure how audio is actually implemented in the bluetooth stack, though, I've only ever done serial communication with it.

jdmichal 6y ago

In the context of dogfights, why do you even need an aircraft at that point? A swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones with a kamikaze AI sounds like the end of human-piloted warplanes to me.

dragontamer 6y ago
I don't think dogfights are the future of air-to-air combat. > A swarm of small, cheap, explosive drones with a kamikaze AI sounds like the end of human-piloted warplanes to me. This already exists. We just call them surface to air missiles or air-to-air missiles. Modern air superiority combat is point-and-click. Send your air superiority fighter over, shoot a missile from beyond the sensor range of the other craft, and then blow them up. ---------- Air support fighters need guns (see A10 warthog) and other ammunition. But will we really be using guns in the future of air to air combat?
- bob33212 6y ago
  Runways, SAM Sites, Fuel Depots are hit at the same time. You gain air superiority very quickly
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    Bombarding the opponent with rockets and artillery usually wins. We've been doing that for decades. The issue is that advanced opponents (ie: Russia or China) will have air defense of their own. How do you expect to take down a SAM site? Its specifically designed to destroy air targets as they approach. With what, with air-drones? Against a hardened anti-air specialty base? This is where electronic warfare comes in handy: "jamming" the radar of a SAM site for example will blindfold them. But the battle of information (jamming, stealth, and advanced radar) is constant, there's no guarantee that your jamming or stealth technology will be good enough for the next generation of Radar. And no. You don't approach a SAM site (or any area a SAM site is defending) from the air. US Patriot systems can take out SCUD missiles traveling at Mach 5. And if your "kamikaze drones" are flying at Mach 5 with an explosive payload, that makes them effectively a SCUD missile.

Justsignedup 6y ago

I think the issue is going to be that the AI can pull G-forces higher than what a human can do and also never having to be re-trained. This means a swarm of "cheap" craft that focus on deploy 20 to take anything out is going to be the optimal. And without the need for all those human systems (glass cockpit, AR consoles, ejection systems, seats, etc) we're good. For non-combat operations they can be flown similarly to drones.

fatbird 6y ago
I'm not sure they wouldn't require retraining. If all the pilots are AIs, the tactics would change, necessitating retraining. Then there would be the search for better AI tactics. You'd still be in a position of a tactics race, driven by simulation and machine learning probably, so the evolutions would iterate faster, and the deciding factor would become the computing power each air force could throw at it.

tomohawk 6y ago

Say you're the president of Elbonia, and you get a report that an unidentified aircraft is in your airspace. Without a human pilot in a fast jet, how do you get up there to take a closer look at the situation to decide what to do? Modern warfare is limited in nature, with rules of engagement, etc. Iran just shot down an airliner because they had poor ROE and control of their systems. Just because something looks like a threat on sensors does not mean it is a threat. It could be that natural phenomena are masking things. It could be a ruse, such as an adversary is disguising a civilian aircraft to look military, or vice versa. This result with dogfighting is interesting, but is only a very small part of what fast jets are useful for.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
What about cameras?
1024core 6y ago
> Iran just shot down an airliner because they had poor ROE and control of their systems. So did the USS Vincennes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

stevehawk 6y ago

pilots don't really take up as much space on these planes as you'd think. these planes are huge. the F22 is over sixty feet long. if you replaced the pilot, controls and screens, weight wise you might get to carry one more AAMRAM, but that sucker is twelve feet long.

knute 6y ago
These are large aircraft (though the F-16 is significantly smaller than an F-22) but the pilot + ejection seat + airtight pressurized compartment + life support systems + displays and controls really starts to add up in both the mass and volume budgets. But the pilot requires more design compromises. The requirement to have a large canopy protruding from the fuselage for maximum visibility is a challenge to both building a stealthy aircraft and aerodynamics. Also, currently the pilot and their circulatory system keeps aircraft from turning at more than ~9G (and then only for brief periods of time). Without a pilot, it would be possible to build aircraft with stunning maneuverability.
- nradov 6y ago
  The maneuverability thing is mostly a myth. Sure it's theoretically possible to build a drone that can turn at >9G. But it won't have sufficient thrust to sustain that rate of turn without losing a lot of energy. And now the airframe has to be stronger to handle the stress, which means heavier, and that compromises mission effectiveness in other ways. And for all that it still wouldn't be able to out maneuver a missile in most realistic conditions. A better option would probably be to design drones that are less maneuverable. Sure more will be shot down. But that will lower the price so just manufacture more.
  - stouset 6y ago
    Following that logic to its conclusion, you could save a lot of money by skipping out on the fuel and carrying capacity to make it back home. Another commenter said it first, but pretty much any set of reasoning that gets you to autonomous drones eventually leads to simply making guided missiles.

gibolt 6y ago

AI can run the show locally, with a remote operator making the actionable decisions. Military drones already operate this way, without much onboard smarts. Not something I'm excited about, but likely inevitable.

puranjay 6y ago

I would imagine a human-less plane would also be able to pull off manuvers that might be too stressful for the human body to handle.

umvi 6y ago
Right, humans can only handle 9Gs, I see no reason why removing the human wouldn't allow pulling way more Gs

jacobr1 6y ago

Also it isn't an either/or type situation. You can have both. The Air Force is working on "Loyal Wingman" where you can have a squadron with a manned system helping strategically target and direct their "unmanned wingmen" ai based planes.

asdff 6y ago

Would you even need a good AI or equipment to be sufficiently disruptive? I imagine a swarm of crudely moving, low cost drones would win most encounters with more complicated targets. This feels like a boon to smaller nations who can quickly gain an edge by capitalizing on existing research.

laksdjfkasljdf 6y ago

(works both ways) and the enemy doesn't need to beat the AI in dogfight, just the infinite side channel attacks on the training set. WW3 might be won by adding a few high intensity LEDs to some old MIGs. https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-outsmart-facial-recognition-tech-2019-10#a-dutch-design-student-invented-a-projector-that-superimposes-an-image-of-a-different-face-over-that-of-the-wearer-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-out...

lumost 6y ago
this is a tough one, to make an exploitable attack you would need at a minimum to have a copy of the flight AI and be able to simulate possible encounters. Given the relatively finite number of side-channels available, it's probably far cheaper for the AI builder to run such simulations and adversarially test against the main exploitable variations such as blasting the aircraft's sensors with bad/confusing data. There just aren't that many methods of interacting with a plane >1km away, and even fewer at the 50-100KM ranges that modern fighters are built to fight at.
- godelski 6y ago
  > to make an exploitable attack you would need at a minimum to have a copy of the flight AI and be able to simulate possible encounters. I'd disagree. Data is more important than the model. But also you can do black box attacks on AI pretty effectively. What you do is train your AI to perform a similar feat and then figure out its weaknesses. Those weaknesses are likely to translate to the other AI. Robustness is a difficult task. As for blasting confusing data, well that already happens to human pilots. There are radar jammers, targeting jammers, visually occluding devices, etc. But hey, if an AI can operate under 90% of typical dog fight situations, then that's a big reduction in needed pilots. Then those pilots can be all trained to be aces.
  - johbjo 6y ago
    If weaknesses can be known in advance, then they can "just" be incorporated into the training environment. Unless you can feed the sensors "false" data, there aren't necessarily that many possible exploits.

georgeecollins 6y ago

Or mixed in with human pilots as a force multiplier. I think that is how they will start being used, so that there is always a human observer. At the start.

pulkitsh1234 6y ago

Wouldn't that make the jet just a fancy missile ?

cwkoss 6y ago

Also, higher maximum G limit. AIs should be inherently much more maneuverable that human pilots because humans can only pull -1 to 9 Gs, AI would only be limited by the aircraft itself.

stouset 6y ago
This is of marginal value. Pulling Gs might help you in a close-in dogfight, but when your primary threat is a radar-guided air-air missile at 75mi+ or a SAM site at 200mi+ of range, Gs don't really matter unless you've failed multiple other possible means of defeating the incoming missile. And even in this case, high Gs aren't going to be much more than a hail mary.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Of course it will- autonomous aircraft that can zigzag to counter threats.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    But nowhere near as fast as a missile that weighs 1% and has a much higher power-to-weight ratio.
  - stouset 6y ago
    No, that's not even remotely close to how aircraft defeat modern radar-guided or even heat-seeking missiles. Even when you take the fleshy bits on the inside of the plane out of the equation, a plane that's capable of carrying multiple missiles and/or bombs is simply not going to be able to out-turn a missile that can pull 50G+ approaching at Mach 4 with any sort of regularity. Pulling hard Gs is all but pointless because even if you cause the missile to "miss", the missile doesn't care about actually impacting you. They're proximity-fuzed and will happily detonate right next to you instead.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
      Didn't say that's how modern aircraft do it. They dont. I envisioned future drone aircraft that behave like an aircraft and missile hybrid with a smaller radar cross section. A large part of getting a missile to target is predicting where the target will be. Zig zagging hard and rapidly ruins the prediction and you don't have to do it all the time- only when it knows it's illuminated.

deleted 6y ago

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virtue3 6y ago

I think what we're actually going to see is something like assistant drones that go with the pilot. So using the f35 as a command&control system to give orders to the ai drones. And/or just have them backthem up in combat anyway. The issue with AI is that combat can change so quickly. It's hard to make the right calls. Let the AI handle Air to Air defense while the human pilots take out what targets they can read by their discretion etc.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
This is explicitly part of the plan for the f35. It also frees up the drones from having to carry sensor equipment, and lets all of the drones benefit from a single sensor suite too heavy for the drones themselves to carry.

jacquesm 6y ago

Not to mention those pesky G-Force limits that humans are subject to. They black out long before aircraft has reached its limits.

mikeyouse 6y ago
I'm almost excited to blow another hundred billion dollars on designing a next-gen aircraft without any G-Force considerations. Current jets designed around a human pilot can already achieve mind-boggling performance of over 10G on multiple axes, what would a blank slate aircraft with none of those limitations be able to do?
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Not that much more, but you'll be able to control the aircraft at all times because the 'pilot' doesn't black out in high-G situations. Maybe save a little bit of weight, smaller radar cross section.
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    You don't think there'd be a bunch of compounding design decisions available to engineers? Pilots currently black out in high G situations so the flying envelope is basically constrained to acceleration / turning radii that are at the edges of pilot abilities. Sure if you removed the pilot in current planes, you'd be able to hit the extremes of that envelope, but if you were to redesign it without ever thinking of a physical pilot, you could have a much wider envelope. What would they be capable of? Something like this but with a ~full-size airplane: https://youtu.be/AXSfFLGeVZA?t=53 https://youtu.be/AXSfFLGeVZA?t=53

iphone_elegance 6y ago

Going to be crazy when nations steal eachothers piloting AIs

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago

I think that days of big expensive aircraft like modern fighters / bombers are numbered. They will likely be replaced with a swarm of drones, which are smaller, cheaper and harder to detect. For $100M (the price of just one fighter) you can field 10000 cheap drones and literally blot out the sun over the field of battle.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Complemented, and AI-piloted, but not replaced. There are significant positive scale factors in aerodynamics. Larger jets have much better thrust to weight ratios, allowing them to move faster, travel further, maneuver better, and carry heavier and longer ranged weapons and sensor platforms. Light drones and big expensive aircraft will both exist in the future and play separate roles. They also won't interact much, aside from a fighter group spearheading a drone group. A drone swarm is too diffuse to be a worthwhile target for a fighter's weapons, but a fighter is too fast to be engaged by a drone swarm. Air battles of the future will likely be conceptually similar to air battles today, but with light drones replacing bombers with guided bombs. An initial wave of fighters will contest air superiority. If they achieve it they will use it to launch long-range attacks to disable a small number of anti-drone hard points. Once the way is clear a wave of smaller, slower drones can swarm in and bomb a large number of targets with precision.
- taneq 6y ago
  Bigger fighters definitely still have a place, but I'm not sure manned ones do. Imagine a dogfight between a manned fighter jet with a maximum G limit of 15G and an AI fighter jet with a limit of 30G - it won't even be close.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    I said AI-piloted in the first sentence.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    To add another response, (a) dogfighting is not something 5th+ gen fighters need to be good at and (b) no fighter is ever going to tolerate 30G in anything except maybe a straight line. Fighters are big and have big shear stresses and would tear apart long before then.

stefco_ 6y ago

Also not being limited by G-forces or endurance.

hnick 6y ago

> Not needing 2-5 years of expensive training. It doesn't stop there. You train one AI, you've trained them all. A minor performance increase instantly upgrades the capability of your entire fleet. An AI that can learn from real world situations will likewise convey that learning to your entire fleet instantly. They say smart people learn from the mistakes of others, but we often have some trouble applying this. An AI should do better. Of course, the corollary is that bugs will affect your entire fleet. I wonder if a future cyber-security role will be to look for AI blindspots to exploit en masse without prior warning (like flying with the sun behind you, but more arcane).

meowface 6y ago
The absolute worst case scenario would be somehow tricking the AI or taking control from it so jets start attacking/kamikaze-ing their own side en masse. I suppose this is theoretically already a risk for some UAVs and perhaps even some advanced human-piloted jets, but a hijacked autonomous fleet would be a wild sight to see. No doubt some organizations are researching how to perform and defend against things like that. The future of asymmetric warfare in particular could get really crazy.
- TheMightyLlama 6y ago
  If I’m approaching an AI equipped force with my own AI force I’m driven to think about the ‘meta game’. In this context I would sacrifice multiple aircraft to ‘taint my the enemies training data with solutions which are a disadvantage in a future fight scenario.
  - meowface 6y ago
    Good point, but the meta will surely be played by the other side, too. They'll expect that their enemies will want to try to "obfuscate" their true operations to confuse things that have been trained to recognize and predict certain actions. That's why this probably won't actually be in use for many decades. You need something a bit closer to AGI than what exists now. Until then, you'll probably have limited use cases, maybe where movement and obstacle avoidance are autonomous but everything else is programmed or remotely controlled. You could imagine small, agile flying assassination drones which can navigate cities and houses to kill targets with short-range projectiles. Very Black Mirror-esque, but far more ethical than the current approach of Call of Duty 4-style blowing up a big patch of land from the clouds with a Hellfire missile, including all the civilians in proximity.

Aeolun 6y ago

Not having a squishy human in the machine makes doing a lot of crazy maneuvers a lot more doable.

dkersten 6y ago

> Of course, that is just raw combat, not other areas of flight where greater human intelligence is of more value. You don‘t need the AI to replace every plane or pilot, you could have a traditional plane and pilot to do all the human things and an AI or two to protect the human or engage the targets. Mixed AI/human squadrons.

rtkwe 6y ago

The biggest advantage I bet (in a real AI fighter) is removing the person from the cockpit. Modern jets have been able to fly harder than humans can reliably stand for a while, being able to pull higher Gs means tighter turns. The real question is how much does gun dogfighting ability matter now because guns are almost vestigial on modern fighters. Dogfights now are missile affairs and this test was a gun based one. https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-pilot-f-35-can-excel-dogfighting-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/f35-pilot-f-35-can-excel-dog...