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Comment by amluto | Hacker News Reader

In a small skirmish in which the side with the AI has a lot of resources, sure.

In a large scale war, I’m not so sure. A fire-and-forget weapon with a 40km range is expensive and might be a scarce resource. Bullets are much cheaper, and if the AI can fly itself close enough to shoot you, it can do so inexpensively.

And this is not to mention that a 40km range weapon requires targeting that works at 40km.

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Highly maneuverable reusable aircraft (even drones) are expensive, and a scarcer resource than missiles.

In modern great power military conflict, if you get to the point where you can fly F-16s or a hypermaneuverable AI dogfighting drone into visual range against an opponent [with inferior planes] who's out of missiles, haven't you already won?

If the opponent isn't inferior in dogfights, then instead of using ~$1mil munitions as expendables, you're using planes (and possibly pilots) as expendables. That's not a good or economical trade-off when missiles are as good as they are today.

40km isn't even the horizon. This cost a million and will kill you four times further.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM

Do you believe a jet fighter drone with a gun can be manufactured with sensing, computing, landing, takeoff, and AI for a million, or even a million per kill vs fighter craft? I do not.

Maybe you'll want AI for loitering munitions, for air to air a fighter drone is going to look more like a first stage for a multi-missile launch platform. It'll fly a while, loiter, volley against aircraft or missiles, then return for rearm and recover.

Bullets are cheap, but an AI airplane with a gun is far more expensive than almost any fire and forget missile since it is effectively a larger, more complex, more expensive fire and forget missile.

That’s the point though, AI is replicable. You don’t have to create the AI every time you fire, just once, and then copy it over forevermore.

The software is freely replicable, the hardware is not. And the hardware for just the “running the AI” part of the reusable AI fighter is going to be more expensive than the electronics of a single use fire-and-forget air-to-air missile, and so will most of the parts of the fighter compared to the missile.

You don’t need a 1.8T parameter LLM to control an AI guided missile. In all likelihood, the model to control these can be run on an iPhone-level computer, which is max $1000. The bottleneck is still the missile.

Yes, but it is potentially reusable.

The idea would be that an AI airplane with a gun would destroy more targets, on expectation, in its lifetime than a missile would.

Depends greatly on the AA capabilities of your adversary. Slower moving, larger drones with guns are easier to detect and shoot down than missiles, and probably more expensive than the average missile as well.

The only way a gun might be more efficient is in a situation with total air supremacy like Iraq or Afghanistan, and the targets would ideally be in the open.

Couldn't the aeronautical capabilities of an unpiloted aircraft have a significantly higher ceiling if the design doesn't need to accommodate for limiting g-forces on a human?

Not by much. Building airframes that can handle higher G forces than a human comes at a huge weight penalty which impacts cost, range, and payload. Plus, it becomes really tough to avoid compressor stall when the flight envelope gets into high AoA plus high speed. The engineers end up having to do funky things with the inlet that increase drag and radar signature.

Yup, any protracted war will resemble WW2 or Ukraine within a year.

It's an ugly truth that you need an advanced infrastructure to build these sophisticated weapons, that level of infrastructure is easily destroyed.

Those weapons are sophisticated today because they were developed by the western military industrial complex under heavy oversight by politicians, neither of which had a need for a cheap, effective, high explosive drone.

Fundamentally, those cost a few thousand dollars in components at most. The reason the end products are expensive is that they are not optimized for mass production. Which, for better or worse, is starting to change. My 2c.

How close do you have to be to confirm the thing you want to kill isn't friendly?

That's kind of a political question. Politicians set the rules of engagement, which dictate the level of confirmation required before employing weapons. It's a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum a certain area can be designated as a free-fire zone in which any airborne contact is assumed to be hostile. In the middle of the spectrum it may be required to use data links and IFF to avoid firing on friendly or neutral aircraft. And at the other end of the spectrum, visual confirmation may be required.

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