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Comment by chis | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely terrifying. I'm sure they will soon find that AI pilots defeat human ones in dogfights 100% of the time, since they have faster reaction times, can tolerate higher G forces, and can be perfectly RL trained in the flight sims we already have.

It's really incredible to me that people aren't protesting in the streets over this stuff. Just in the last month we have * AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies * AI solving long-standing math problems without any meaningful human help * AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America * AI now represents over 50% of GDP growth in America and yearly capex will soon exceed the size of the $1 trillion US military budget

Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned? I mean it really all reads like a sci-fi plot with a bad ending at the moment.

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> I'm sure they will soon find that AI pilots defeat human ones in dogfights 100% of the time,

Unfortunately you're wrong. It's not soon. It's 6 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_AlphaDogfight

Dogfights aren't really a thing for a modern military. What the AI enables is much higher endurance than is feasible with a human in the loop. They planes can stay flying as long as they can be refueled, which is also going AI.

Are dogfights still relevant? Isn't it mostly shooting missiles outside of visual range these days?

yeah well beyond the line of sight

you're either stealth, or you're a target.

they're shooting 6+ R-37s a day in Ukraine, for example

Dog fights are relevant for training. Also useful for slow drone work. However fighter on fighter is where missles are used

That's the current meta though is the thing and it could change.

There's a plausible world where drone-aircraft are reliable enough at missile evasion that a decent strategy is to get in close and use the cannons because your entire airframe is much more attritable.

There's even a plausible reason to do this: opening a weapons bay to shoot a missile generally reduces stealth, and not hauling a bunch of extra rocket motors and mass around could make you lighter, faster and with better engines to do it.

From what I have read (from unreliable sources), Ukrainian fighter pilots tried this a few years back and stopped due to too many losses.

To engage a slow flying drone with cannons from a fighter jet, they have to get really close while flying close to stall speed. They had some success in shooting down drones but the explosion and the debris caused several lost fighters.

Maybe something like a Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighter with a gunpod could work. But that has very little other use in the battlefield.

I mean the other way round: rather then combat drones launching missiles, combat drones which use stealth and speed to close to dogfighting distances with aircraft and engage with their own cannons.

It may be that risking some drone airframes for a higher overall kill rate becomes worth it when you're at no risk of losing the pilot, and could be more affordable then the missiles you'd otherwise have to expend (e.g. when you get to things like the Meteor which are very expensive and also use up jet engine components you might otherwise want to put on somewhat more reusable drones).

These systems still require a human to command the jet, they jsut don't have to be inside them.

"This critical testing will pave the way for human pilots to seamlessly command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft."

The reason they are doing this is because the Military is already building a bunch of autonomous drones and fighter jets that already run on this system so they are retrofitting existing equipment with the same system so they can all fly together.

"Ultimately, the capabilities advanced under AIR will enable a wide variety of future joint force operations, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs."

Which are these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming

And everyone is developing these.

> Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned?

Is someone, somewhere using the wrong bathroom? Or is the wrong colored person crossing an invisible line in the desert? Those seem to be the only issues that reliably get the (American) public to the polls.

If your protest were to be successful, would you be doing anything besides putting the USA at a massive disadvantage? What would be the plan exactly, sustenance farming while the rest of the world leaves us behind?

> Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned?

Only when they look out their window and feel immediately threatened by what they see. Humans are shortsighted as fuck.

>Just in the last month we have * AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies

Except this never happened, it's a piece of marketing. It never "went rogue" but followed an intentional prompt (exploit-related benchmark), with hardly surprising results as the capabilities of this model were well known.

>AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America

An entirely different kind of AI, not huge generalist models. Neural networks are being experimented with in sensors and control systems since the 80s and are widely used in everything since AlexNet, not sure what's new here, especially "this month" new.

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