Air Force has plans for drones using artificial intelligence

 Telegraph:

The US Air Force is gambling big on artificial intelligence (AI). The world’s leading air arm plans to acquire a thousand AI-controlled armed drones in the coming years. It’s betting that these “loyal wingman” drones will be nimbler and cheaper than traditional manned fighter jets.

It’s a solid wager. A recent experiment proves why.

In early 2019, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – the Pentagon’s fringe-science agency – recruited eight teams of coders to develop the first-ever dogfighting AI under the auspices of the AlphaDogfight project.

The competitors included major American defense firms such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, smaller companies including Maryland-based Heron Systems and upstart squads from universities such as Georgia Tech.

In mid-2020, Darpa hosted a series of dogfighting competitions pitting the AIs against each other. And a few months after that, it deployed the most competitive AI – Heron’s – against an actual human: a US Air Force F-16 pilot who gave only his callsign, “Banger.”

Darpa broadcast the video-game style contest online in a spectacle similar to an extreme-sports event. Banger sat in a mockup of an F-16 cockpit and flew a simulated battle against another F-16 flown by the AI.

It ended quickly. After some hard turns, the Heron drone drew a bead on Banger and shot him down with simulated gunfire – and then repeated the feat in several subsequent mock fights.

The Heron AI’s secret was its aggression. The AI had stood out from the other algorithms owing to its preference for head-on attacks with its simulated gun. With its bold tactics, the Heron drone neutralized a human pilot’s main advantage over an artificial mind: creativity.

Early drone AIs “struggled with those adversaries that did something even just a little different,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Justin Mock, an F-16 pilot who observed the initial Darpa trials. But Heron’s artificial pilot doesn’t have that problem.

In the AlphaDogfight contest, Heron’s code moved too fast for Banger to do anything surprising.
...

It has been a while since I piloted an aircraft, but I am pretty sure that I would have been on match for the AI craft. 

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