Originally published at: AI fighter pilots dogfighting with humans in the skies over China | Boing Boing
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From what I can tell fighter jets have become a less and less important part of military readiness over the last generation as their roles have been supplanted by other technologies but everybody is so enamored with the “Top Gun” image that we keep throwing money at them anyway.
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a much smaller, unmanned weapons platform can outturn and out accelerate the fragile meat and water control system in a ‘manned’ aircraft any day of the week.
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The US still does a lot of training for dogfights but the reality is a good kill is one where the enemy never sees the inbound missile fired by a fighter that never was on their scope.
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“Coming in hot Mav”
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I wouldn’t be surprised if there hasn’t been an honest-to-goodness dogfight in any military conflict since 1992.
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Yep.
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More importantly, they are cheaper and more expendable than a pilot and a plane with systems designed to keep the pilot alive. You can send up swarms of them to take out a plane.
Plus stealth has reduced the need for fighter cover for strike missions.
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Still more recent than the last time a US Marine had to use his fancy sword in combat, I’ll bet. But at least the swords don’t cost billions (I hope?).
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Close, 1999
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That 1992 Robin Williams movie Toys was kind of a snore storytelling-wise but they sure got the part about UAVs replacing fighter jets right.
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LL Cool J as a couch was awesome.
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Or a president:
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That seems to be the most recent time that a plane shot down another in combat, but does it count as a “dogfight” if they’re too far away to see each other? Wikipedia defines a dogfight as aerial combat between fighter planes at close range. That may be somewhat subjective but in the case you’re referring to the missile was fired from about 33 km away and the planes were 18 km apart when the missile made contact.
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I guess i you want to beat an AI you have to really be prepared to push past human limitations:
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I, too, have trained against AI. The question remains whether their AI is better than Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator was. And we’ve got all the recent developments for the US military still trying to develop an AI that’s better than pilots (rather successfully it looks like), but they’re not training against it… yet.
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Skynet here we come!
Yeah we’re laughing now at our silly adversary, but remote-controlled Chinese aircraft (when they do roll off the Chinese assembly line) will have much better performance than our aircraft: they’ll be much lighter and can pull many more Gs. Really, theyll just be remotely-piloted guided missiles. They’ll cost 1/100th to 1/500th of our F-35, so they’ll be able to throw tons of them at every one of ours. As usual, we’ll be fighting the previous war and they are fighting the one to come. The US Air Force is unwilling to concede they might be losing dominance the same way the US Navy was unwilling to concede battleships had lost dominance in WW2.
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