Posted on 02/14/2023 6:22:36 PM PST by Chode
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just announced that their AI pilot program ACE has moved out of computer-simulated dog fights to flying real F-16s.
The flights occurred at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and a safety pilot was on board the plane to take control if anything went wrong, but nothing did.
Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan "Hal" Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE said,
"We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities. We didn't run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live."
In 2020, the ACE AI defeated experienced human Air Force pilots in simulated dogfights — every time.
Which is very different from the other DARPA AI test where marines easily defeated the bot by wearing cardboard boxes:
Marines wearing cardboard boxes easily defeat Pentagon’s new AI system. According to an excerpt shared from the upcoming book Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre, the Pentagon brought in eight Marines to test its new AI detection system, and it wasn't even a contest. NOTTHEBEE.COM https://notthebee.com/article/marines-wearing-cardboard-boxes-easily-defeat-pentagons-new-ai-system Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, told The New Yorker,
"The ACE program is part of a wider effort to ‘decompose our forces' into smaller, less expensive units. In other words, fewer humans and more expendable machines. DARPA calls this ‘mosaic warfare.' In the case of aerial combat, Pettyjohn said, ‘these much smaller autonomous aircraft can be combined in unexpected ways to overwhelm adversaries with the complexity of it. If any one of them gets shot down, it's not as big of a deal.'"
In addition to swarms of AI powered aircraft, DARPA imagines collegial cooperation between soldiers and AI on the battlefield. According to their AI NEXT campaign, DARPA envisions
"a future in which machines are more than just tools that execute human-programmed rules or generalize from human-curated data sets. Rather, the machines DARPA envisions will function more as colleagues than as tools."
The take away here is that there are two different ways these folks are imagining turning AI into killing machines:
A truly intelligent AI would fly away.
I don’t think the cardboard box strategy will work with fighter jets.
Correct!
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
With folded hands?
Now when these machines of war attack their political opponents libtards can blame the AI and claim “mistakes were made”
Bflr.
Ping
No, it isn't, yet. But that won't be far off. Look how far AI has come in just the last few years.
I think, therefore I am. I guess.
Hubris.
Sure. Believe what you will. Technology isn't going to stop simply because you don't think it's possible.
Now they have something to go after the AI balloons.
What you call “intelligence” is knee-jerk stimulus/response.
That’s why AI chatbots eventually become Nazis.
Which is very different from the other DARPA AI test where marines easily defeated the bot by wearing cardboard boxes:
It’s a little more difficult to keep a cardboard box on an F16 at Mach .75 and 30000 feet.
Fratricide...
yup, at that point, ya just hope he won’t waste a $250K missile on yer azz...
One thing about it, once perfected, or nearly so, training (programming) subsequent “pilots” goes to, what, an hour at most, and maybe 100 “pilots” can all be “trained” in parallel.
Moreover, some weight can be stripped out of the plane, there’s no concern about G forces, etc.
Kinda scary, actually. We better “get there” first.
I was a CTT in the Navy back 30+ years ago.
In 1990, MAYBE 1991, my dolphined CTT Div Chief gave me a week to go in the truck, figure out how to record what I heard, “saw” (and then SAW on a TV onto a VHS), and onto a computer.
I took 4 of the 5 days figuring it out (cabling wise, working with my CTM’s to get the right connections for an RCA input, etc.) and on the 5th, recorded something from the local NBC channel onto video, then playing it back for him.
Ended up going to Fort Huachuca in Arizona to do some RF intercept, on what I didn’t know. I soon found out.
Ended up being a test of a UAV-SR, that ended up being the original Predator, again, 30+ years ago.
I recorded everything, laughed at a BUNCH of sh!t, packaged it up, wrote it up, and sent it up the chain.
One of the sections asked “How can this be improved?”
My answer was - ENCRYPT IT. Sending video data over a downlink in the clear tells the interceptor (enemy or friend) two things - where IT is, and where YOUR looking. Cause, all they have to do is find the freq.
I never heard a word if they did it or not, but I don’t have any HP SpecAn’s on hand.
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