The aircraft flew up to speeds of 1,200mph. DARPA did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    AI will win if not now, then soon. The reason is that even if it is worse than a human, the AI can pull off maneuvers that would black out a human.

    Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling. Flight suits and training can only do so much to keep the pilot from blacking out.

    • NegativeLookBehind@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling.

      I think the same will eventually be true for AI, especially when you give it weapons

    • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      Maneuverability is much less of a factor now as BVR engagements and stealth have taken over.

      But, yeah, in general a pilot that isn’t subject to physical constraints can absolutely out maneuver a human by a wide margin.

      The future generation will resemble a Protoss Carrier sans the blimp appearance. Human controllers in 5th and 6th gen airframes who direct multiple AI wingman, or AI swarms.

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Plus the ai has no risk, outside of basic operation.

      Humans have an inherent survival instinct to which drones can just say “lol send the next one I’m dying cya”

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        To fight optimally, AI needs to have a survival instinct too.

        Evolution didn’t settle on “protect my life at all costs” as our default instinct, simply by chance. It did so because it’s the best strategy in a hostile environment.

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.orgOP
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        5 months ago

        Jets are a lot more expensive. What’s at risk is all these resources for the jet going down the drain.

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Huh? Jets are far more replaceable than a human operator who takes years of training and has “needs”.

          Ya know unless your military is running on cold war fumes or something and you can’t afford to build an airframe you already have in production

          • diffusive@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Training a combat pilot used to cost (in early 2000, not sure now) 10M€ for a NATO member.

            Find me a modern jet that costs so little. Regardless of what politicians say, human life has a price… and it is waaaay below a jet (even including the training)

            • grue@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, but procurement of a combat pilot has about a two-decade lead time. You can build more jets a lot quicker (potentially even including the R&D phase).

              • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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                5 months ago

                Also as this war expands to become planet-wide, industrial output of drones will expand many orders of magnitude.

            • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              It’s not just money. It’s time, public perception, quantity trainers, quantity student seats etc

              A drone is ready the moment it comes off the assembly line, is flashed with software, and tested.

        • everyone_said@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I’d imagine they’d evetually design a jet purpose built for an AI that would be a lot cheaper than a human-oriented one. Removing the need for a cockpit with seats, displays, controls, oxygen, etc would surely reduce cost. It would also open the door for innovations in air-frame design previously impossible.

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            We keep talking like we’re discussing the future, but autonomous drones are already fighting in the skies of Ukraine.

            Begun, the drone wars have.

    • BrightCandle@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Not so much f16s but the more modern planes can do 16G where the pilot can’t really do more than 9G. But once unshackled from a pilot a lot of instrument weight and pilot survival can be stripped from a plane design and the airframe built to withstand much more, with titanium airframes I see no reason we can’t make planes do sustained unstable turns in excess of 20G.

    • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      AI will win if not now, then soon.

      This article didn’t mention it but the AI pilot did win at least one of the engagements during this testing run.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        5 months ago

        Not that that isn’t interesting, but I’d jump in and insert a major caution here.

        I don’t know what is being done here, but a lot of the time, wargaming and/or military exercises are presented in the media as being an evaluation of which side/equipment/country is better in a “who would win” evaluation.

        I’ve seen several prominent folks familiar with these warn about misinterpreting these, and I’d echo that now.

        That is often not the purpose of actual exercises or wargames. They may be used to test various theories, and may place highly unlikely constraints on one side that favor it or the other.

        So if someone says “the US fought China in a series of wargames in the Taiwan Strait and the US/China won in N wargames”, that may or may not be because the wargame planners were trying to find out who is likely to win an actual war, and may or may not have much to to with the expectations the planners have of a win in a typical scenario. They might be trying to find out what would happen in a particular scenario that they are working on and how to plan for that scenario. They may have structured things in a way that are not representative of what they expect to likely come up.

        To pull up an example, here’s a fleet exercise that the US ran against a simulated German fleet between World War I and II:

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

        Fleet Problem III and Grand Joint Army-Navy Exercise No. 2

        During Fleet Problem III, the Scouting Force, designated the “Black Force,” transited from its homeport in the Chesapeake Bay towards the Panama Canal from the Caribbean side. Once in the Caribbean, the naval forces involved in Fleet Problem III joined with the 15th Naval District and the Army’s Panama Division in a larger joint exercise.[9] The Blue force defended the canal from an attack from the Caribbean by the Black force, operating from an advance base in the Azores. This portion of the exercise also aimed to practice amphibious landing techniques and transiting a fleet rapidly through the Panama Canal from the Pacific side.[10]

        Black Fleet’s intelligence officers simulated a number of sabotage operations during the course of Fleet Problem III. On January 14, Lieutenant Hamilton Bryan, Scouting Force’s Intelligence Officer, personally landed in Panama with a small boat. Posing as a journalist, he entered the Panama Canal Zone. There, he “detonated” a series of simulated bombs in the Gatun Locks, control station, and fuel depot, along with simulating sabotaging power lines and communications cables throughout the 16th and 17th, before escaping to his fleet on a sailboat.

        On the 15th, one of Bryan’s junior officers, Ensign Thomas Hederman, also snuck ashore to the Miraflores Locks. He learned the Blue Fleet’s schedule of passage through the Canal from locals, and prepared to board USS California (BB-44), but turned back when he spotted classmates from the United States Naval Academy - who would have recognized and questioned him - on deck. Instead, he boarded USS New York (BB-34), the next ship in line, disguised as an enlisted sailor. After hiding overnight, he emerged early on the morning of the 17th, bluffed his way into the magazine of the No. 3 turret, and simulated blowing up a suicide bomb - just as the battleship was passing through the Culebra Cut, the narrowest portion of the Panama Canal. This “sank” New York, and blocked the Canal, leading the exercise arbiters to rule a defeat of the Blue Force and end that year’s Grand Joint Army-Navy Exercise.[11][10] Fleet Problem III was also the first which USS Langley (CV-1) took part in, replacing some of the simulated aircraft carriers used in Fleet Problem I.[12]

        That may be a perfectly reasonable way of identifying potential weaknesses in Panama Canal transit, but the planners may not have been aiming for the overall goal of evaluating whether, in the interwar period, Germany or the US would likely win in an overall war. Saying that the Black Fleet defeated the Blue Fleet in terms of the rules of the exercise doesn’t mean that Germany would necessarily win an overall war; evaluating that isn’t the purpose of the exercise. If, afterwards, an article says “US wargames show that interwar Germany would most likely defeat the US in a war”, that may not be very accurate.

        For the case OP is seeing, it may not even be the case that the exercise planners expect it to be likely for two warplanes to get within dogfighting range. We also do not know what, if any, constraints were placed on either side.

    • Gigan@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Jets are far more powerful than humans are capable of controlling. Flight suits and training can only do so much to keep the pilot from blacking out.

      Can they be piloted remotely? Or would that be too dangerous with latency

  • EndOfLine@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    In 2020, so-called “AI agents” defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.

    It did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.

    I’m gonna guess the AI won.

    • Glytch@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I was actually assuming the opposite, because if the AI won they’d want to brag about it.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Bragging just means more money flowing to enemies’ research programs. When a fight is inevitable you want to appear as weak as possible to prevent your enemy from taking it seriously.

    • Harbinger01173430@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Hahaha how the fuck is AI going to win in air-to-air combat if we completely delete them when playing Ace Combat in the highest difficulty?

      Seethe, AI tech bros.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You think aliens are actually piloting the craft that come all this way?

      You’re never gonna see an alien body because they aren’t here.

      Bet we’ve got a drone or two of theirs tho.

        • psud@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Dkarma’s comment requires context. They think aliens have visited Earth. They presume people who don’t agree with them expect that if aliens had visited Earth, some would have been shot down and alien bodies would have been recovered

            • psud@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              It has nothing to do with the post. I believe the post inspired dkarma to work out that brand new argument that there are no alien bodies (at area 51 probably) because the aliens would use drones

          • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            Whether aliens are visiting us matters just about as much as whether tanks are rolling into the village of uncontacted tribes.

            Our tactical disadvantage against alien technology is zero, so they have zero priority as targets.

            Our best bet is to make friends, converse with them. But they are obviously not interested in talking. So our only option is to pray they continue to let us exist. So far they seem to be.

  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Are dogfights even still a thing?
    I remember playing an F15 simulator 20 years ago where “dogfighting” already meant clicking on a radar blip 100 miles away, then doing something else while your missile killed the target.

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      ‘Dogfighting’ mostly just means air-to-air combat now. They do still make fighter jets that have guns or can mount guns, but I think they’re primarily intended for surface targets rather than air targets.

  • inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    One step closer to machine domination.

    Like, not even in a joking sense. Ukraine is using a ton of drones, the future of physical warfare will simply be a test resources and production.

    I’m honestly not sure if this will be good or bad in the longterm. Absolutely saving any amount of human life is a good thing, but when that is no longer a significant factor, I wonder if we will go to (and stay at) war for more trivial reasons.

  • unreasonabro@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    giving AI military training is “responsible”, is it? Oh good, I’m glad training software to kill is going “responsibly”, that’s good to know. Kinda seems like the way a republican uses words - backwards, in opposition to their actual meaning, but hey, fuck the entire world, right?

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      If you want some sort of arms control agreement for AI, you’re going to be faced with the problem of verification that countries are complying.

      My guess is that that’s probably very difficult to do. All you need is a datacenter somewhere and someone with expertise.

      And if an arms control agreement doesn’t exist, then a country not developing a promising technology just disadvantages that country.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        And if an arms control agreement does exist, it’s just a trap for those naive enough to think such things work.

        Putin got us to avoid prepping for a Ukraine invasion simply by repeating that he wasn’t going to invade. And right up until the very moment it happened, the dominant conversation still was not based on the premise that he was going to.

        The whole concept of doublespeak works because humans have a powerful compulsion to simply believe what others say. Even if we know their actions and their words are in conflict, we have an extremely hard time following our observations of their actions, and ignoring their words.

        It’s like the Stroop task, but with other humans’ behavior instead of ink colors.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Conservatives tend to be those who, by experience, have been forced out of the notion that the base of existence is not war.

      It’s an illusion which can only be maintained when others are facing the war.

      Humans tend to remain in the comfortable illusion until they are forced out of it, usually by an encounter with a psychopath victimizing them, or an actual war.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    We all know which aircraft won the fight.

    Those of us who play video games do at least. All the AI difficulty settings are arbitrary. You give the bot the ability to use its full capability, and the game is unplayable.

    • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Plus they had humans on board the AI jet. I imagine it could pull some crazy insane Gs without the human pushing the engineering to the red line.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      In video games the AI have access to all the data in the game. In real life both the human and AI have access to the same (maybe imprecise) sensor data. There are also physical limitations in the real world. I don’t think it’s the same scenario.

      • BluesF@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Not exactly, AI would be able to interpret sensor data in a more complete and thorough way. A person can only take in so much information at once - AI not so limited.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Don’t get me wrong. Humans have many limitations that AI don’t in this scenario. I’m not saying that a human would do better. For example, as others have stated, an AI doesn’t suffer from G forces like a human does. AI also reads the raw sensor data instead of a screen.

          All I’m saying that this case is not the same as a videogame.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    5 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In a drill over Edwards Air Force Base, the pair of F-16 fighter jets flew at speeds of up to 1,200mph and got as close as 600 metres during aerial combat, also known as dogfighting.

    While in flight, the AI algorithm relies on analysing historical data to make decisions for present and future situations, according to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which carried out the test.

    This process is called “machine learning”, and has for years been tested in simulators on the ground, said DARPA, a research and development agency of the US Department of Defense.

    In 2020, so-called “AI agents” defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.

    Pilots were on board the X-62A in case of emergency, but they didn’t need to revert controls at any point during the test dogfight, which took place in September last year and was announced this week.

    "The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now, said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.


    The original article contains 455 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • SeabassDan@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    “Luck is one of my skills” when it turns out this entire thing is a terrible idea for the date of humanity.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Planes have been able to be remote-controlled since the 80s.

    Since the 80s.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      I mean, yeah, but the significant bit here isn’t remote control by a human, but that there isn’t a human running things.