19 ms·
DARPA now has AI-controlled F-16s working as a team in virtual dogfights
- trident5000 6y agoYou cant seriously have a modern military without this so better to just get it done with rather than China (really any country) only have the tech.
- XorNot 6y agoWell also if the US ends up in a scuffle with a super power, air superiority will more or less decide which conventional force achieves its objectives.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- macintux 6y agoThere's a joke dating from the Cold War. Two Russian generals sipping coffee in Paris. One asks the other, "So who won the air war?"
- protomyth 6y agoIt's an old joke. Some generals from Iraq may want to talk about how many tanks were left after the air war was lost.
- ISL 6y agoOne cannot easily discuss tanks in Iraq without mentioning the Battle of 73 Easting at least in passing. Superior armament, training, and tactics make a huge difference. https://www.historynet.com/learned-battle-73-easting.htm https://www.historynet.com/learned-battle-73-easting.htm TL;DR: As part of that engagement, a troop of 9 US tanks and 12 APCs encountered one of Iraq's finest tank brigades. They destroyed ~50 Iraqi tanks, 25 APCs, 40 trucks and more in 23 minutes without taking any casualties.
- Maursault 6y ago> Superior armament, training, and tactics make a huge difference. The Republican Guard was absurdly outmatched. Re: training... arguably, the encounter occurred in the way it did due to (then) Captain McMaster's aggressive advancement leading to the necessity of ignoring regimental orders not to become decisively engaged. What made the decisive difference was technology, specifically, infrared sighting and laser range-finders available to and used only by one side.
- blt 6y agoCan you explain this joke?
- rch 6y agoI believe the implication is that wars are won by taking and holding ground.
- azernik 6y agoThey're "sipping coffee in Paris" as in they've beaten NATO and occupied Continental Europe. They're asking "who won the air war?", with the implication that they don't really care because they won the part that mattered.
- blt 6y agoThanks!
- liquidify 6y agoI think that is pretty narrow sighted. A new major world war could be won with viruses, bacteria, drones, small robots, hacking financial systems, space lazers, genetically enhancing your population for financial domination, etc.. Air superiority is possibly a factor in some possible versions of war, but the reality is that it mostly gives us an advantage that allows us to press our will upon lesser militaries. That doesn't mean it couldn't be the dominant factor, but I imagine a major war between any super powers would be so costly to human life (since we are so good at killing now), that alternatives to traditional means of takeover would probably be preferred.
- kamaal 6y agoOr may be the next world war will be won by a country that doesn't fight it. China is building international super highways for trade, continent wide trade belts and inter-continent markets. I don't think the US is lucky enough to get a war now. Countries will just maintain some minimum deterrence in the form of missile forces. So that they don't get out right invaded or sanctioned. Beyond that it will just be trade war and which country has citizens lined up to work 20 hour shifts. What makes all this so easily possible is we are not making new leap frog success in science(physics) anymore. Eventually engineering everywhere will catch up with science. In short every one can and will have weapons to deter invasions and sanctions. The problem for west is not that a war will happen, but that it won't. Every once in a while the world arrives at a paradigm change where everything changes. And no matter how good you are at the old game, it doesn't matter because the game has changed. We are likely at that place now.
- XorNot 6y agoYou're failing to define what the objectives are. Wars have objectives, that's why people fight them. The US and China have no ability to occupy each other's lands, nor interest in doing so. Neither do they benefit from out right destruction of infrastructure because that escalates to a nuclear conflict which wins no one anything. The most plausible engagement is US intervention in the strait of Taiwan to thwart a Chinese invasion and occupation. And that war is essentially conventional: it results from US fleets being out of position and internal politics making it look like a good opportunity.
- azernik 6y agoThat depends on whether the air-defense laser research everyone's hyped up about produces something useful in the next few decades.
- Lammy 6y agoSounds like our respective leaders are pitting us all against each other to farm us for the technology that enables our oppression.
- david-cako 6y agosounds like the fundamental dilemma in existence, that an individual is a free agent in a prescriptive system. can businesses be free agents? certainly someone is excited about laser missile defense, and certainly the economy of ideas is in play.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoWhile we’re at it we need to remove the stigma of working on this type of software. China and Russia are plowing full speed into this technology with their best engineers. We must encourage our bright engineers to work on this tech. What will Russia and China donor they come out ahead with AI weapons? Whatever they want.
- chovybizzass 6y agoI remember when my uncle worked on Global Hawk in the late 90s. We've come a long way.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ergot_vacation 6y agoWhat puzzles me is that as of yet, there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy, which seems like a MUCH more powerful application than this stuff. Sure, it can learn how to fly planes and drones, or drive tanks or terrifying robot dogs, but isn't the real potential here in duck-taping GPT-3 to a mountain of past battlefield data and specs and having it run war games for a while? Yes, I realize I'm almost literally describing SkyNet, but isn't that where the power would be, for better and worse? The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them, and current machine learning has magnified this ability several-fold. AIs have now repeatedly been dropped into all kinds of video games and gone from morons to competent to beating all human players and exploiting bugs no one even knew existed. In a grim sense war is just another game. It has constraints, resources, definable win and loss states, etc. Consider that conflicts have often tilted based on a single novel strategy discovered by limited human commanders, and then ponder what an AI that improves its Mario speedrun via nearly imperceptible collision glitches could do. Potentially, weapons don't matter as much as how well you can use them.
- R0b0t1 6y agoWhat if it already is? Do you have any reason to believe no one has been working towards this amazingly obvious eventuality? I suspect if a serious war started one side would just lose, almost as if by accident. I have no reason to believe this.
- fudged71 6y agoThe british forces with Anduril drones and AI just won a battlefield simulation because they won on strategy.
- hungryhobo 6y agoI think both are important? Overall strategy and the ability to execute.
- op03 6y agoCause the Taliban showed you dont need F16s and AI.
- crazypython 6y agoF-16. F-32. When will we have F-64?
- chrisco255 6y agoSadly, never, since Nintendo refuses to give up on the trademark.
- azernik 6y agoIt's F-35, sadly
- bsldld 6y agoThen why have a real fight now? US launches its virtual flights, China, Russia, UK will develop their own. So let future war be of virtual fights! The side which loses a virtual plane pays the cost of the real plane to the other side. And the country which pulls out of this game(once it starts) loses the war! I see the future of war as total virtual affair. No need for Boston Dynamics style robots or expensive military hardware. This idea is nothing new. In one of the star-trek episodes this was the theme, the only difference there was a real human was sacrificed for each virtual human lost!
- melling 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon Btw, Shatner turned 90 today
- Frost1x 6y agoJust watched TNG episode with a tribute to Gene Rodenberry after his death (Unification): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(Star_Trek:_The_... Been slowly rewatching OTS and TNG and the storylines and characters are so great.
- AtlasBarfed 6y agoThe haves fight drone wars between themselves. But that won't happen because of nuclear deterrent. So the haves will fight with drones and the have-nots will spill their blood. This was presaged in Afghanistan. Army drone pilots did their shift killing Afghan soldiers with drones in an American base, get in car, drive to family in suburbs once your shift was up. Next up: all those "shooter" gamers can get paid to operate robot infantry! None of that pesky resistance to actually killing people like they dealt with back in WWI and WWII.
- justatdotin 6y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/veterans-ptsd-drone-warrior-wounds.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/veterans-ptsd-dr...
- Simplicitas 6y ago... events that realistically are very unlikely to ever happen, since wars are becoming extinct .. yet we keep pouring money into crap like this
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- credit_guy 6y agoPeople were quite certain wars were a thing of the past before World War 1: "the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by starting a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Illusion
- Frost1x 6y ago"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein The post 1945 peace we've enjoyed is because a lot changed after WWII, not the least of which was the development of nuclear weapons and frameworks of nuclear deterance used around the world. The problem now is that so many players have nuclear weapons they might leverage in dire situations should things go south that these sort of conflicts have largely been avoided. Most 'wars' now occur through financial/economic, information, and psychological means to gain upper hands. The rest of the conflicts are largely against smaller players who don't have nuclear weapons or even comprable fighter jets. I wouldn't rule out another major war though because people seem to crave conflict but I think it's going to take a lot more to get into the scale of conflicts we've seen before.
- adrianN 6y agoI believe that was at least one war going on somewhere in the world pretty much continuously since WW2.
- sintax 6y agoMore efficient ways to kill eachother! Yey?
- steve76 6y agoI remember reading an article about war games. We lost because we needed to turn on an old computer that hasn't been updated. Clippy killed us all.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoAI is not affected by G-forces. The biggest limitation in a fighter plane is the pilot.
- emkoemko 6y agomight as well just launch missiles at that point.
- Lwrless 6y agoExactly, the human body actually became the limitation. And all these remind me of Ace Combat 7 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Combat_7:_Skies_Unknown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Combat_7:_Skies_Unknown)
- jhgb 6y agoThis is partly true. But you might still want to avoid g-forces, not because of who or what controls your airborne unit but rather because maneuvering sheds kinetic energy, which is undesirable in combat and you might want to perform drastic maneuvers sparingly purely for kinematic reasons.
- nradov 6y agoNo, the biggest limitation on a fighter plane is the fuel fraction. Even new UCAVs won't be designed to handle G forces higher than current manned fighters because it isn't very useful and requires bad design compromises in other areas.
- wellthisisgreat 6y agoThey mention sub-scale aircraft tests at the end of 2021. Does anybody know by any chance what that means? How big is that sub-scale? Would they possibly have live ammunition?
- datavirtue 6y agoTime for another Geneva Convention.
- MattGaiser 6y agoInternational law is only worth the guns behind it.
- ehwhyreally 6y agoAI should never be allowed to take human life.
- ISL 6y agoWhile the genie was never even in the bottle, it is interesting to contemplate other paths we might have taken (or might yet take): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
- jonbaer 6y agoGood time to watch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames again.
- brundolf 6y agoDark times.
- mssundaram 6y agoThe header photo features someone sitting in front of a computer screen and the computer is running Ubuntu.
- CaptainJustin 6y agoI was thinking through something recently. Here's where I think things are going: - I suspect that air platforms will be littered with censors and massive amounts of data will be collected. - This data will be used to train AI to complete missions. - The USAF will start by augmenting human-led teams with AI flown aircraft. - Polyglot teams consisting of platforms with different roles in the same mission. All of this has led me to believe that the countries that engage in the most air missions (most combat active air force) could ultimately have AI models orders of magnitude better than other countries. It would be great to hear someone who knows more than me (not hard) interrogate this idea. I've been captured by it and I'm meandering down the road of possibilities that start there.
- haltingproblem 6y agoA Tesla cannot make a left turn (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542462), which most 16 year olds and 85 years drivers manage while either inebriated or not fully in control of their faculties. However we fully expect F-16 which take years of training of highly fit specimens of the human race to fly to be controlled by an AI. I somehow don't see it happening in the next two decades or atleast a decade after we have L-5 driving.
- anaganisk 6y agoMay be its just regular Airliner AutoPilot, with make coffee functionality .
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI don't disagree, but the 'fit humans' has two components that AI pilots don't suffer from; blackout from G forces, and high situational awareness. That said, they can put these planes into mock dogfights with human pilots on the redflag range in Nevada and see where they have advantages and where they fall down. Personally I would expect this sort of thing to be a pilot assist long before we got to Level 3 war fighting.
- Breza 6y agoAgreed. Computers have been massively important to flying for decades. It's already basically impossible to fly a modern warbird without computer assistance. Here's a Hacker News-level amount of nuance for that statement: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8049/are-fighter-jets-designed-to-be-so-inherently-unstable-that-a-human-cant-fly-on https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8049/are-fighte...
- xiphias2 6y agoThose humans have a goal of destroying the opponent without dying. Tesla’s autopilot would be much more efficient if killing people sometimes would be OK. This is also why drones are so dangerous to the future of humanity.
- rebuilder 6y agoSilver lining: When autonomous fighter planes do away with the human pilot, maybe sci-fi authors will finally stop putting fragile meat bags in their space war machines.
- stubish 6y agoIf AI can competently dogfight in an F16, doesn't that make the F16 completely obsolete for dogfighting? Because the same sort of AI in a craft that doesn't have to cater for a human or even bother making it back to base (say, a missile) is going to kick the butt of an F16 no matter who the pilot is.
- angry_octet 6y agoOnly if you consider single games; in repeated games a lower risk engagement (choose to draw or retreat rather than take a high chance of loss) will make sense. The flight dynamics model won't have any data points for large parts of the flight envelope, so if your robo pilot exceeds tested limits we don't know what will happen, or even if control is recoverable. Experienced pilots certainly understand dynamic performance better than state space models -- the original learning platform! People learn jets in 100 hours, it remains to be seen how much training a machine takes. Pulling 12G all the time also imposes stresses on the platforms that they were not designed for, so you'd probably want to ration that. What I'm getting at is that sustainment of operations is as big a problem as individual engagements. You can loose a whole campaign by responding too heavily (or weakly!) to feints and probing.
- Wohlf 6y agoDogfighting itself is obselete, and has been for decades. Modern missiles are simply too good.
- zoomablemind 6y agoIt may not be obsolete as such. Just that the fuel constraints make modern day dogfighting (topgun style) too limited in efficacy for either side. Especially when most of the recent conflicts displayed a decisive technological disparity in the air and to lesser extent on the ground. It seems that bombing still remains the most in-demand task for the airforce (fighters included). Should that be done by AI too? The new air threat appears to stem from the ability to fit nuclear power sources onboard of cruise missiles. Which basically turns each such missile into a very determined UCAV. Kind of revisiting the project Pluto [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
- unnouinceput 6y agoThis is obsolete in the grand scheme of a war. The future is swarm of drones. Imagine a future tomahawk going at full x 20+ speed of sound and exploding over Beijing releasing 10 thousands drones, each capable of like 10 minutes of flying, but enough to search for high valuable targets and kaboom! the entire China's communist rulers dead. Win the war before it's starting.
- angry_octet 6y agoWhat an asinine post.
- tgv 6y agoIt may not be a pleasant message, but it's not asinine: if a random user can think of it, you can be sure someone is or was working on it.
- angry_octet 6y agoTechnically just nonsense (Tomahawk is subsonic, could not carry many drones, very unlikely to make it that far, the Chinese govt is vast and could not be 'taken out' even with 10000 cruise missiles), but the most objectionable part is "Win the war before it's starting". These are human lives we're talking about. No one wins by starting a war, and there are no "home by Christmas" wars now, if there ever were.
- etiam 6y agoThey'd just trigger the EMP:s and lasers and use the attempt as an unusually well justified propaganda opportunity. I don't think the utility for this more traditional scale of vessel will be going away any time soon.
- mnd999 6y agoIf F-16s can do this, what exactly was the point of the F-35 (and possibly the F-22)?
- angry_octet 6y agoNeither F-22 not F-35 is designed to win via close quarters dogfights, but at medium to long range engagements, where the opponent can't even isolate what direction you're coming from, let alone achieve missile lock. Having said that, the F-22 has M1.8 supercruise, and F-35 can boost to M1.3 and then cruise, so they have a considerable combat speed advantage over the F-16.
- tryonenow 6y agoDidn't see anything in the article - has anyone come across sources for more details on the actual network architectures/algorithms they used? That they prefaced one of the algo names with Alpha is probably a good clue...
- LinuxBender 6y agoSomewhat off topic, but I would like to see this in commercial aircraft first. Dogfights? No, automated AI running through checklists and automated coordination with ATC ground systems. Today if the aircraft you are flying in has problems, the captain and co-captain work as a team to go through a long set of conditional checklists. This is precious time they don't have and very prone to human error. If something is not correctable, they may call pan-pan or mayday if they have time. First priority is to fly the plane. With "AI" the aircraft could have figured out the problem was about to happen, attempt several thousand combinations of corrections or compensating controls and ATC would already know the exact condition before a human uttered a word. Automatic escalation could bring on a set of support staff with knowledge of the aircraft if it can't self correct. Instead today we are depending on humans for this and then recovering a data flight recorder to see after the fact what went wrong. After we perfect this, then teach the aircraft dogfights for aircraft/drone avoidance, allowing aircraft to communicate their intentions. This could also help compensate for over zealous pilots pull back too much on take off, inducing drag/stall on a high angle of attack / low speed.
- Breza 6y agoIt depends on what goes wrong. If the failure is within the design spec (eg Engine 2 just flamed out) then it could speed through the checklists faster than humans. That kind of system may have prevented the loss of Air France 447. I think an AI system would have resulted in a higher loss of life on United 232, when the four humans in the flight deck managed to figure out how to crash the plane on a runway (where a MASSIVE fire/rescue response was waiting) instead of just flopping over into the nearest cornfield. Related, here's my favorite radio call of all time, recorded when Captain Haynes was flinging the out-of-control United 232 in the direction of the airport, knowing that even if he made it to a runway he didn't have any way to stop. "Sioux City Approach: United Two Thirty-Two Heavy, the wind's currently three six zero at one one; three sixty at eleven. You're cleared to land on any runway." "Haynes: [laughter] Roger. [laughter] You want to be particular and make it a runway, huh?"