Black Hawk flies, lands and avoids threats - all without pilots
blog.al.com
blog.al.com
Autonomy is fine for high-flying, loitering aircraft, not so fine for low-altitude flight relying on easily-exploitable terrain avoidance & positioning technologies.
"In December 2010 NAVAIR awarded a $46 million contract to Kaman for two aircraft, and in 2011 they completed a five-day Quick Reaction Assessment.
In December 2011 an unmanned K-Max was reported to be at work in Afghanistan. [...]
On July 31, 2012, Lockheed announced a second service extension for the K-MAX in Afghanistan for the Marines. This extends operation time to the end of March 2013, with the option to extend through to the end of September 2013. As of July 31, 2012, Lockheed reports the K-MAX has completed 485 sorties, 525 flight hours, and delivered over 1.6 million pounds of cargo since its deployment in November 2011"
The military (having a significantly lower standard for 'safe enough' operation than, say, airlines) will be an interesting inroad for autonomous transport vehicles in society.
I doubt the latter is true, and I'm not sure about the former either. The military R+D budget is big, but these days (maybe always?) it pales compared to public nonmilitary and commercial R+D activity.
The one thing that a human can do is make real mistakes, anticipate such errors, and make seemingly illogical choices -- illogical to a computer. True deceit. A computer may be able to one day fake deceit, but there will be a logical probability factor to it. Detection of such deceit will likely be more difficult for a computer algorithm than faking deceit.
--- for how much longer? and when taken at scale, is the human race really all that great at strategy? We are so much at the mercy of emotions to ever be truly great strategists. What if, for example, given food production and water usage etc the math dictated that the population must reduce, do you really think this strategy would be adopted? Of course not.
i don't really see the point of self-flying helicopters, it's not like there's a shortage of bright young men and women who want to fly these things. The real challenge isn't flying helicopters, but finding ways to resolve situations without blowing shit up. As fun as that might be...
Fewer caskets arriving at Dover AFB for repatriation.
It also makes sense from a purely rational point of view because the major costs of that capability are pilot training (millions) and maintenance. It doesn't hurt nearly as much to lose a chopper when you don't lose those millions spent in pilot training along with it, so you can take much greater risks with it
We still mop the floor with Go programs and AI in RTS games.
Here's the difference between humans and AI in a nutshell: Competent humans can usually tell when someone is using an exploit against them. AIs almost never have a clue that's happening.
"...must think russian"
You are right though, aircraft like the Global Hawk operate at altitudes that are safe from enemies, so operationally they are easier to reason with for autonomous use.
Edit: For the people who are still alive...
Except the people that the autonomous attack vehicle is killing.
I want to make a snarky comment about the dead (possibly innocent civilian) people not being winners, but I guess a drone is less likely to kill innocent people than shock & awe style bombing and cluster bombing, which tend to harm a lot of children.
It's a weapon of war and so the US is unlikely to release any information for many years. That's a shame, because they've probably got some neat tech which could be used for self driving cars.
edit: I mean no disrespect to soldiers - I refer to the politicians.
Please do tell. Thanks.
As a countermeasure, we would have a second-channel kill switch and self-destruct mechanism. If you try to hijack it back to an unfriendly location, we blow it up when you approach it with resulting casualties. If you try to use it as an offensive weapon we use the kill switch and/or self-destruct in an area of our choosing.
To overcome the possibility of an external self destruct signal reaching the drone when you hijack it, you'll probably come up with tricks like bathing it in strong spread-spectrum interference or dropping it into a Faraday cage. Either can be detected and trigger the self destruct internally.
Perhaps you can disable the drone by hitting it with an EMP weapon but still recover it. Good luck.
That seems counterproductive. If you create a self destruct system that can auto-enable based on conditions, the enemy just needs to create those conditions. They may be deprived of the weapon system, but so are you.
Terra-forming (moving landmarks or painting hills with reflective paint of sorts) and cloud salting could also bear some interesting results to at least introduce noise into the data-input systems. Enough noise and you'd probably down something.
But seriously, in the 80's the Soviet brass still treated tank battalions somewhat like fire and forget weapons. Basically, they'd just mow down everything in front of them until they broke.