Military AI vanquishes human fighter pilot in F-16 simulation. How scared should we be? - The Loyal Wingman drone, pictured above, is controlled by a human fighter pilot who instructs the drone's AI to perform specific tasks.jpg

Miloch wrote in
:

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinio...hes-human-figh
ter-pilot-f-16-simulation-how-ncna1238773

Artificial intelligence can master difficult combat skills at warp
speed, but the Pentagon’s futurists must remain mindful of its
limitations and risks.

From the outside, the simulated aerial dogfight the Pentagon held two
weeks ago looked like a standard demonstration of close-up air-to-air
combat as two F-16 fighter jets barreled through the sky, twisting and
diving as they sought an advantage over the other. Time and time again
the jets would “merge,” with one or both pilots having just split
seconds to pull off an accurate shot. After one of the jets found
itself riddled with cannon shells five times in these confrontations,
the simulation ended.

From the inside, things seemed very, very different.

“The standard things we’re trained to do as a fighter pilot aren’t
working,” lamented the losing pilot, an Air Force fighter pilot
instructor with the call sign Banger.

That’s because this wasn’t a typical simulation at all. Instead, the
U.S. military’s emerging-technologies research arm, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency, had staged a matchup between man
and machine — and the machine won 5-0.

Indeed, the victor was an artificial intelligence-directed “pilot”
developed by Heron Systems. It quickly put the lie to a statement
DARPA made just one year ago, “No AI currently exists … that can
outduel a human strapped into a fighter jet in a high-speed, high-G
dogfight.”

The AlphaDogfight simulation on Aug. 20 was an important milestone for
AI and its potential military uses. While this achievement shows that
AI can master increasingly difficult combat skills at warp speed, the
Pentagon’s futurists still must remain mindful of its limitations and
risks — both because AI remains long away from eclipsing the human
mind in many critical decision-making roles, despite what the likes of
Elon Musk have warned, and to make sure we don’t race ahead of
ourselves and inadvertently leave the military exposed to new threats.

That’s not to minimize this latest development. Within the scope of
the simulation, the AI pilot exceeded human limitations in the
tournament: It was able to consistently execute accurate shots in very
short timeframes; consistently push the airframe’s tolerance of the
force of gravity to its maximum potential without going beyond that;
and remain unaffected by the crushing pressure exerted by violent
maneuvers the way a human pilot would.

All the more remarkable, Heron’s AI pilot was self-taught using deep
reinforcement learning, a method in which an AI runs a combat
simulation over and over again and is “rewarded” for rapidly
successful behaviors and “punished” for failure. Initially, the AI
agent is simply learning not to fly its aircraft into the ground. But
after 4 billion iterations, Heron seems to have mastered the art of
executing energy-efficient air combat maneuvers.

Human pilots could perhaps devise tactics designed to exploit the
Heron AI’s limitations, just as Banger did with temporary success in
the final round of the competition. But, like the Borg in "Star Trek,"
the AI-powered pilot may, in turn, eventually learn from its failures
and adapt. (The machine-learning algorithm was disabled during the
tournament.)

However, the tournament’s focus on within-visual-range warfare with
guns didn’t challenge the AI pilot to perform more complex tasks. It
focused on a narrow, though foundational, slice of air warfare known
as "basic fighter maneuvers," leaving out aspects such as using
sensors and missile weapons that may decide the outcome of an air
battle well before the opposing fighter pilots ever come close enough
to see each other.

For comparison, the U.S. Air Force’s newest fighter, the F-35, is
optimized less for dogfighting and more for stealthy surprise attacks
executed from beyond visual range, as well as for fighting
cooperatively with friendly air and surface forces by sharing sensor
data.

Even more importantly, one-on-one duels between individual fighters as
occurred in the simulation are very different from likely air-battle
scenarios in a major conflict, which could play out over huge
distances and involve dozens of supporting air and surface units.

And machine learning still has major limitations. It can have trouble
working collaboratively, even though cooperation is key to how
militaries fight wars. AI agents are also known to rigidly adhere to
flawed assumptions based on limited datasets, and their trial-by-error
learning style can produce suboptimal outcomes thanks to the errors
side of the equation when confronting novel situations.

DARPA has acknowledged that it wanted to establish AI’s capability in
fundamental piloting tasks before tackling more complicated ones. The
need for additional development should be reassuring to those like
Musk who fear that AI poses an “existential threat” — but it is a
reminder that prematurely relying on AI carries other risks, as well.
In the near term, the military wants AI to assist, not replace, human
actors in war.

Most armed drones today are remotely piloted by a human and only rely
on autonomous algorithms to avoid crashing when their control link is
interrupted. But remote control prevents the drone aircraft from
reacting with the super-human speed and precision the recent
tournament demonstrated they are capable of.

One concept rapidly entering the mainstream is the so-called Loyal
Wingman drone controlled by a nearby manned fighter pilot who
instructs the drone's AI agent to perform specific tasks. Basically,
the human handles big-picture decision-making, while the AI takes on
the risky dirty work of pressing home attacks and drawing away enemy
missile fire.

A key advantage of the Loyal Wingman concept is that it may cost as
little as $3 million each compared to around $80 million to over $100
million for a new F-35 stealth fighter. That means the drones could be
treated as reusable assets that can be sacrificed if necessary.

Indeed, there is a debate raging in military circles across the globe
as to whether it’s affordable to develop a new generation of manned
fighters or whether lower costs and greater convenience dictate that
the next generation will be largely unmanned with at least
semi-autonomous AI.

But an AI capable of performing the full range of missions doesn’t
exist yet. And as AI- and remote-controlled unmanned systems
proliferate, militaries will sharpen their ability to disrupt control
links and hack AI systems. Therefore, caution is needed to avoid a
"Battlestar Galactica" scenario wherein a heavily networked military
is hindered by jamming and computer viruses.

The potential advent of autonomous war machines also arouses justified
ethical and existential concerns. For example, integrating
facial-recognition AI to further automate drone strikes could go wrong
in all sorts of terrible ways. And we should certainly never leave AI
in a position to initiate the use of strategic nuclear weapons, as has
been suggested.

In a sense, the AlphaDogfight confirmed something we already knew in
our gut: Given sufficiently good algorithms, AI can outperform most
humans in making rapid and precise calculations in a chess-like
contest with clearly defined rules and boundaries. How flexibly and
cooperatively AI pilots can make decisions in the more chaotic and
uncertain environment of a high-end war zone remains to be seen.

In the next few years, semi-autonomous AI will be harnessed by pilots
of both manned and unmanned combat aircraft. They will eventually be
delegated to piloting and attack roles that they can perform faster
and more precisely than humans.

However, AI as it stands isn’t yet poised to innovate or make informed
judgments in response to novel problems, and for that reason it is
essential that humans remain in the loop of future robotic air wars.
One of those novel problems, in fact, will be deciding just how much
autonomy we can safely accord to future robotic war machines.



I am not sure that there even a
place for air-to-air combat in future
wars. Ground attack missions are already
dominated by drones, in short order they
will be defended by other drones as well,
IMHO.

Generals are always ready to fight
the last war over again........