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> Why put humans on warships at all? The whole idea of the article is to explore what's possible with current technology, and general-purpose AI is not part of

• amalcon 15y ago
  How would having humans a few light-seconds away from the missiles be able to help with that?
  • zeteo 15y ago
    Eh? My point was that humans on board can improvise (remember Apollo 13) and carry out their objectives even in the presence of a forewarned and intelligent opponent.
    • srl 15y ago
      The real reason, of course, is that war is just so much cooler when people are dying. Sources: G. Carlin. Honestly, though, I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years that a 10s delay is sufficiently small, and the AI can handle anything likely to occur in under 20s on its own.
      • zeteo 15y ago
        >I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years Yes, people have been expecting AI to become human-like within 20 years for the past 6 decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#Dartmouth_Conference_1956:_the_birth_of_AI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige... ("Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years")
        • ricree 15y ago
          Did you read the rest of his post? He didn't predict general intelligence within the next 20 years. Rather, he predicted that the special purpose weapons AI would be sufficient to handle the sort of latencies that would happen in some hypothetical space combat. Perhaps I'm reading your posts wrong, but it seems a fairly conservative prediction to me.
          • zeteo 15y ago
            We're talking about replacing people in combat vehicles with AI. Considering the need for tactics, strategy and improvisation in a conflict that can take place light-years away, that won't work with anything less than general-purpose AI.
            • tuppy 15y ago
              Where is anyone talking about conflicts light-years away? I think we may be discussing different things. The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts, primarily because it is trying to deal with realistic space combat using current technology. FTL drives are not part of that paradigm. Yes, obviously if something is light-years away you would need to develop general purpose AI to make those decisions or send a command ship with a human crew to the location, but the post you are replying to was discussing 10s to 20s delays associated with local space combat.
              • zeteo 15y ago
                > The article itself concentrates on intra-system conflicts Neptune is more than 4 light-hours away, and the Oort cloud (discussed as a possible source of projectiles) a full light-year further. So I don't see how anything short of general purpose AI can be tele-operated for intra-system conflicts.
                • tuppy 15y ago
                  Again, why does it require general purpose AI? The two examples you cherry-picked are the furthest objects in our solar system. You've literally picked the outlying examples and made them the rule. The same "problem" could be solved by sending a bunch of what are essentially missiles-carrying-missiles with algorithms that boil down to orders to shoot at any objects that are hot or fast moving or match certain radar signatures. This technology has been in place since the first heat-seeking missile... 1956! There are plenty of other solutions that do not require a general AI (such as sending command ships out).
      • InclinedPlane 15y ago
        And? If you are 10 light seconds away from a battle your round trip control delay is 20s. Also, if weapons are zipping around at 2,000 km/s then 10 light seconds is only 25 minutes flight time. We certainly won't have 2,000 km/s projectiles in 20 years but in 100 we might.
    • amalcon 15y ago
      Ah, I see. Here's the thing: when you're sitting in a glorified tin can far from any resources or support, you don't have a whole lot of options. The great triumph of Apollo 13 was simply not dying. It was a great triumph, but it's not like they completed the mission of landing on the moon in the face of multiple mechanical failures. What, exactly, would a warship do after realizing that the plan had failed? Their options are basically: run, surrender, die. Running is not even an option given current technology. It's not like they can ditch the ship and land somewhere. It's not like they can hide or fake destruction. They are sitting in a glorified tin can, which is (as stipulated) unable to follow the parameters of the mission. About all they could do is select a different target. If you want the capability to improvise, the best (and really only) option is the saboteur. I suspect saboteurs would play a substantial role in interstellar warfare for that reason.
      • zeteo 15y ago
        Oh, come on. Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts. The crew still has to decide where and how the vehicle moves, what targets to fire at, with which weapons, which field repairs can and should be done etc. etc. etc.
        • amalcon 15y ago
          Tank and plane crews are also "sitting in a glorified tin can", but that didn't preclude, say, WW2 from being vastly more strategic than any preceding conflicts. That was because military doctrine had adapted to the invention of radio at that point. That would actually go away at the kind of distances we're talking about. Thirty-second communication lag is enough to ruin the command battlefield view. Almost all of those things were actually decided by the officers commanding the tank / plane battalions, not the crews of the tanks themselves. Those officers had unprecedented battlefield knowledge. None of this would be true of spaceships. That's not even considering that spaceships operating at interplanetary speeds have far smaller effective maneuvering envelopes than any WW2 vehicle. Even the clumsiest terrestrial vehicle can turn around and leave. A realistic spaceship cannot, unless it had planned for it in advance.
    • Locke1689 15y ago
      The major problem (which is addressed in the article, by the way) is that once you've set a course you can't really change it much at all. Newtonian mechanics really limits your options here. Warships and space battles would be completely preprogrammed: detect enemy ship; set course for enemy ship; accelerate to maximum velocity; attempt to kill enemy ship with automated systems and not die as you shoot past. This isn't really an "engagement" as we think of it now, it's more of just a fire-and-pray scenario.
      • zeteo 15y ago
        Once you fire a rifle, everything is also Newtonian and deterministic. You still have to move into position, decide which target to fire at, with what ammo etc What you describe is quite close to an actual weapon used in WW2, the SG 500: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdfaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdfaust
        • Locke1689 15y ago
          All of those things have mathematically optimal solutions given known information. It should be trivial to solve the system.
          • ordinary 15y ago
            That does not follow. See TSP.
            • Locke1689 15y ago
              It doesn't follow in every case, but here the calculations are things like missile ranges, acceleration values, maximum speed, etc. These all seem to be rather simple Newtonian calculations. Basically the problem dilutes down to: plot an intercept course, fire weapons, rinse, repeat.
  • gospelwut 15y ago
    Why do we use drones piloted by humans? I think given the sophistication of modern financial algorithm and counter-algorithms, it's easy to see why humans will always be necessary to wage war even if they're not on the ship. Perhaps, yes, aircraft carriers will be reduced to remote proxy bases for drones and missiles, but I imagine humans will always be at the helm even if the helm is miles away.
    • amalcon 15y ago
      Why do we use drones piloted by humans? Because guided missiles are expensive, dumb rockets are cheap, and drones (while expensive) are recoverable. We want someone empowered to cut and run, so that we don't lose the drone. At the distances that spaceships would need to battle, you need to use autonomous guided missiles anyway. The lightspeed communication delay would rather defy the point of any sort of remote-piloted drone. Also because the guidance-in-atmosphere problem is much more difficult than the guidance-outside-atmosphere problem.
• nl 15y ago
  You are thinking of a space ship as similar to an airplane, a tank or a ship. In truth it is more analogous to a bullet or bomb - point it in the right direction and try and get it there as fast as possible.
• dspeyer 15y ago
  Are you sure about that? Last I knew, interceptors hardly ever succeeded against guided missiles unless the missiles actually had locater beacons on them. Defenses that work are to create decoy targets (against simple guidance systems like heat-seeking) or to spoof a cancel order on the control channel. Neither seems likely to hold against a really capable attacker.