US Air Force Tests an AI -Powered Drone Aircraft Prototype (msn.com) 65
An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:
It is powered into flight by a rocket engine. It can fly a distance equal to the width of China. It has a stealthy design and is capable of carrying missiles that can hit enemy targets far beyond its visual range. But what really distinguishes the Air Force's pilotless XQ-58A Valkyrie experimental aircraft is that it is run by artificial intelligence, putting it at the forefront of efforts by the U.S. military to harness the capacities of an emerging technology whose vast potential benefits are tempered by deep concerns about how much autonomy to grant to a lethal weapon.
Essentially a next-generation drone, the Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. Its mission is to marry artificial intelligence and its sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats and then, after getting human sign-off, to move in for the kill... The emergence of artificial intelligence is helping to spawn a new generation of Pentagon contractors who are seeking to undercut, or at least disrupt, the longstanding primacy of the handful of giant firms who supply the armed forces with planes, missiles, tanks and ships. The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.
It also is forcing them to confront questions about what role humans should play in conflicts waged with software that is written to kill...
The article adds that the U.S. Air Force plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 AI drones for as little as $3 million apiece. "Some will focus on surveillance or resupply missions, others will fly in attack swarms and still others will serve as a 'loyal wingman' to a human pilot....
"A recently revised Pentagon policy on the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems allows for the autonomous use of lethal force — but any particular plan to build or deploy such a weapon must first be reviewed and approved by a special military panel."
Essentially a next-generation drone, the Valkyrie is a prototype for what the Air Force hopes can become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle. Its mission is to marry artificial intelligence and its sensors to identify and evaluate enemy threats and then, after getting human sign-off, to move in for the kill... The emergence of artificial intelligence is helping to spawn a new generation of Pentagon contractors who are seeking to undercut, or at least disrupt, the longstanding primacy of the handful of giant firms who supply the armed forces with planes, missiles, tanks and ships. The possibility of building fleets of smart but relatively inexpensive weapons that could be deployed in large numbers is allowing Pentagon officials to think in new ways about taking on enemy forces.
It also is forcing them to confront questions about what role humans should play in conflicts waged with software that is written to kill...
The article adds that the U.S. Air Force plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 AI drones for as little as $3 million apiece. "Some will focus on surveillance or resupply missions, others will fly in attack swarms and still others will serve as a 'loyal wingman' to a human pilot....
"A recently revised Pentagon policy on the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems allows for the autonomous use of lethal force — but any particular plan to build or deploy such a weapon must first be reviewed and approved by a special military panel."
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here comes the hunter-killers.
PS: they were time-travelling, so we're not late, the things would go back in time...
Valkyrie (Score:2)
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The Valkyries are the Choosers of the Slain. They decide who goes to Valhala, not who lives or dies. HUMANS decide who lives or dies.
Also, whoever called that robot a Valkyrie is a dick. Brunhilde is not amused.
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Autonomous over the horizon missile platform? What could possibly go wrong?
Oh, wait; we already know. . .
https://www.foreignpolicyjourn... [foreignpolicyjournal.com]
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Every time I pull up in a fast food restaurant I hear, "Human Alert, Human Alert."
Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
For several reasons, people going into AI should think long and hard on whether they are willing to base their career on weapons development or not. It seems the morality of individuals will drive how AI will impact the world.. and for those who like weapons, whether in games or not, basic attitudes will enable a broader range of potential fuckups than with nukes alone when semi-autonomous battle platforms become the norm. I was hoping the world would stabilize a bit before we got here but sci-fi seems to lead the way..
Re:Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a few people who went into a defence industry. Some actually believe they do useful work, most have a don't care attitude, just a job.
I lost contact with a good friend because of that belief. (Unable to discuss, complete head-on faith in the goodness of security forces).
Most people don't think long and hard about the implications of their work, and they wont. Most do work to earn income, and to potentially enjoy activity.
Myself I push back against all kinds of data collection, because "you never know", but when I bring up [1], the response is "that could never happen here".
Remember folks, one election is all it takes...
[1] https://medium.com/@hansdezwar... [medium.com]
Re: Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
How quickly people forget there is a wanna-be Stalin attempting to reconquer Eastern Europe as we speak. And an increasingly militant Chinese government with their sights set on Taiwan. The defense industry is the only reason Ukraine and Taiwan are still free nations right now.
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
How quickly people forget there is a wanna-be Stalin attempting to reconquer Eastern Europe as we speak. And an increasingly militant Chinese government with their sights set on Taiwan. The defense industry is the only reason Ukraine and Taiwan are still free nations right now.
One could also argue the defence industry is the reason Ukraine and Taiwan, have enemies at their proverbial gates now.
How quickly people forgot the dire warnings of a sitting President, long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
How quickly people forget there is a wanna-be Stalin attempting to reconquer Eastern Europe as we speak. And an increasingly militant Chinese government with their sights set on Taiwan. The defense industry is the only reason Ukraine and Taiwan are still free nations right now.
One could also argue the defence industry is the reason Ukraine and Taiwan, have enemies at their proverbial gates now.
One would be wrong.
The US defence industry is not the reason Putin invaded Ukraine and its Soviet Era military in 2014.
Nor is it the reason Putin ramped up his invasion of Ukraine with it's still still largely Soviet Era military in 2022.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants to expand Russia towards the borders of the USSR while erasing the Ukrainian culture, language, and any religion other than the Russian Orthodox Church.
The US defence industry is one of the main reasons (but not the only reason) why Ukraine still exists.
China wants to invade Taiwan because they see it as a rebel province and not a separate country. Here, the US defence industry (or at least US military) is definitely the only reason why Taiwan exists. Otherwise China long ago would have simply taken it over.
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That would have been the president who led the European theater's war effort on behalf of the Allies. He wasn't making the point you think he was making. Half potato ration for you, tovarisch.
One of our other famous WWII generals argued vociferously for the immediate invasion of Russia once we had demonstrated the Bomb. That's the guy we should have listened to. A lot more people would be alive, healthy, wealthy, and happy if we had.
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There are a few cases where it's pretty much 100% certain. For instance, imagine that the first atomic bombs hadn't been ready in time to be used on Japan. There's no taboo attached to them, no sense of horror. Fast-forward to the 1950s... where Truman now has no reason to deny MacArthur's request to drop bombs on the North Koreans and Chinese that are 10x-100x bigger.
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Believe me, I haven't forgotten, I'm one doorstep away.
And one nutjob doesn't war make, it takes quite a few more believing in the same bullshit the one does. Today its Putin and Nazis in Ukraine, in 2003 it was WMDs in Iraq. (Comparing core principle, not the scale of committed atrocities. By those standards the US Army is quite civilized), tomorrow The One China Policy enacted by force...
Depending on your side of the border: Same shit, different smell.
There's a quote of Primo Levi, going something like :
"
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Most people don't think long and hard about the implications of their work, and they wont. Most do work to earn income, and to potentially enjoy activity.
Now you know why the socioeconomic system is the way it is. They didn't plan for the corruption though.
Re:Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems the morality of individuals will drive how AI will impact the world
Not really. What will drive it is the morality of corporations (i.e. an almost complete lack of morality).
Yes, individuals are developing the various bits and pieces of AI but any individual who refuses to take the next step toward an immoral, but not illegal, corporate goal get replaced by someone who will take that step.
Those who are most willing to comply usually the ones who get promoted into leadership positions, thus the prevalence of psychopaths who have no empathy toward the human race among CEOs and other high level executives (who, it must be noted, are the ones setting the goals for the corporation).
Beyond a certain size, corporations' ethics are just mob mentality restrained only be the laws that restrict them from causing harm to society.
But sure, let's keep deregulating so that corporations can be ever more profitable and ever more powerful. It hasn't worked out well for the past 100 years, but surely this time it will be different.
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Damn. I meant to hit preview to look for typos and hit submit instead.
It's too early for this level of thinking.
Caffeine good. Sunlight bad.
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T. Every unethical actor ever
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Though it's a little more immediate when you're talking about the military.
Imagine how many governments are watching Ukraine kick Russia in the nuts with so much drone assistance... and thinking, "hey, now we can afford to match those assholes next door who keep threatening us, and all we need is a Radio Shack and access to GitHub!".
I'm not so worried about the military anyway. At that scale, people are going to get butchered one way or the other. Where this kind of thing should concern you is at the leve
Re:Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:4, Interesting)
>The thing that caught my eye in the summary was the "for 3 million apiece"
In the long run, that's going to be a gross over-estimate.
Imagine a factory in China churning out a purpose-built naval drone electronics kit for $100, you just have to strap it into a container with some explosives, a battery, and some thrusters... then watch it travel to the supplied coordinates and blow up the first large mass of metal it can find within range.
How about an ornithopter drone that can pass as a real bird? (These already exist) They're not going to have much of a payload, but imagine a flock of fake birds with swarm intelligence - when they get over their programmed kill zone, they pick out their human targets and just silently drop from the sky.
Even better, instead of a 'Bouncing Betty', how about a mobile sentry drone with face recognition and a small-calibre weapon? Leave it on the ground, probably camouflaged... and when it sees people, it jumps up and flies around shooting as many people in the face as it can before it's downed?
You can't beat artillery or air strikes like that, but it also means that actually holding territory is going to be impossible within a few kilometres of potential launching points for such attacks.
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I think this. The thing that caught my eye in the summary was the "for 3 million apiece". Ukraine has successfully destroyed multi-billion dollar pieces of russian stuff like that ship for peanuts. I think that is the lesson to be learned. Cheap and plentiful are going to win. The US military learned a valuable lesson (amongst many) from the lives of Ukrainians. I really don't get why Americans are unhappy with giving Ukraine weapons. It has offered invaluable lessons at the cost of no American lives.
This is something that doesn't get talked about enough. There's an old saying that generals always fight the last war. And for all the US military folks are complaining about Ukrainians performance at combined arms, the US hasn't fought a proper war in a very long time.
Iraq and Afghanistan were counterinsurgencies more than wars, Vietnam was arguably a counterinsurgency as well. Ukraine is doing something the US hasn't had to do in a very long time, fight another army with a (fairly) cohesive command struct
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I really don't get why Americans are unhappy with giving Ukraine weapons.
Most rational people, regardless of nationality, like to help people who are being attacked. The main concern with giving another country weapons to defend themselves is that the weapons do not go away once defense is no longer necessary.
What will Ukraine do with the weapons that are given to them after their current war is over? Will they stay defensive or will they use those weapons to gain more resources from their neighbors? The only track record of note within that region is indeed Imperialism... so wh
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You realize though, that lots of coders are in the same position?
I mean, it's not like those missiles and such don't use F/OSS software in them - I expect a few to use Linux somewhere in the stack, for example. That little utility you wrote can easily find it way into some missile system or other.
I mean, it's one of the founding principles of the GPL - no user restrictions.
Re: Will your career be founded on murder or not? (Score:1)
Will your career be founded on IRONY or not? (Score:3)
FTFY. Explaination: https://pdfernhout.net/recogni... [pdfernhout.net]
"The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
They can perform search and rescue missions (Score:4, Funny)
It went down well.
The word 'China' should have made some impact (Score:1)
and therefore any additional information would not have been needed.
You would be like 'Oh hel; yeah! As much width as China!'
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Re: Width of China? (Score:2)
Re:Width of China? (Score:4, Interesting)
And gaining and maintaining an edge in artificial intelligence is one element of an increasingly open race with China for technological superiority in national security.
Military planners are worried that the current mix of Air Force planes and weapons systems - despite the trillions of dollars invested in them - can no longer be counted on to dominate if a full-scale conflict with China were to break out, particularly if it involved a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
That is because China is lining its coasts, and artificial islands it has constructed in the South China Sea, with more than a thousand anti-ship and antiaircraft missiles that severely curtail the United Statesâ(TM) ability to respond to any possible invasion of Taiwan without massive losses in the air and at sea.
I do like how they immediately shit on the F-35 afterwards, despite having been really enthusiastic and publishing innumerable articles justifying the exorbitant cost of it:
After decades of building fewer and fewer increasingly expensive combat aircraft - the F-35 fighter jet costs $80 million per unit - the Air Force now has the smallest and oldest fleet in its history.
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It's the start of the justification of another huge expenditure of the military budget on BS that will never work right.
It is an inherent problem based on the nature of humans. Killing other humans is one of our core competencies. What is more, at some level, many of us enjoy it.
And of course, discussions always fall apart, as there is always someone to call research evil and researchers immoral. But we can try.
So at what level is research on a topic related to military action made non-actionable? And how does a country enforce this on the rest of the world?
Because maybe country A might determine AI drones is forbidden r
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As you mention, some people will call certain research evil and immoral. I think those people are incredibly naive. Human nature is at it's core tribalism. If we don't bother to stay ahead on the curve we will be overcome by jealous and envious competitors.
People love to say American sucks or it's evil or a 100 other things but I'll take it over the Nazi Germany or Communist China. Sure, we could do better. There is still time to work towards better but if we just decide to lay down our arms, stop investing
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I do like how they immediately shit on the F-35 afterwards, despite having been really enthusiastic and publishing innumerable articles justifying the exorbitant cost of it:
Who? The New York Times has been enthusiastic about the F-35? When? Perhaps many years ago, when the project was new. No one has been enthusiastic about the F-35 for... probably ten years. Except Lockheed, of course.
This [nytimes.com] is the first link from a search. I don't see a single positive article on the first page of links. Where did you get the impression that the New York Times has been publishing innumerable articles justifying the exorbitant cost of it? That's not a rhetorical question, I'd like to know wh
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Go look at a map. That's how far the drone can travel. See, really high level stuff here.
And Skynet is born (Score:1)
Queue Terminator theme songâ¦
Not surprising (Score:2, Informative)
While this has been in development for some time, Ukraine's devastating use of drones against Russian troops and materiel has shown the value and need for such weapons. This is merely the next step up from having a human guide the drone to its target or seeking out new targets.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
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It's only a weakness because it's low tech, using frequency bands and omnidirectional antennas like it's still 1943.
If you have a mechanically aimed directional transceiver in optical range or mm-band microwave, a jammer would have to put enough power into the drone to burn it before it could disrupt the communication. Even links made using high dynamic range phased arrays might be able to be made to be defacto unjammable (the phase shifters need to be able to deal with the jamming power, but the transceive
editing (Score:4, Insightful)
"Powered by != "controlled by"
Words have meanings, people.
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Left leaning, so communist like China/Russia? Yeah, no thanks. We're better off trying to find a balance instead of swinging toward either side of authoritarian extremism.
AI is probably only left in the view of Americans, which are almost entirely on the right side of the political compass. I mean, nearly no one here is saying the government should control the means of production or own all the land. No one is remotely talking about taking much of anything from rich people. We barely even make real efforts
A convenient excuse to justify illegal killings (Score:4, Interesting)
If an aircraft pilot kills innocent civilians, the pilot gets court-martialed (at least in theory: the US has been killing a lot of civilians in foreign countries without giving them their day in court or even asking if they could enter said country's airspace for the past 2 decades, but I digress...)
The pilot's CO who ordered him to do something illegal gets court-martialed too.
Who's going to the slammer when the AI kills someone it shouldn't? Nobody. Some committee will no doubt "investigate so it doesn't happen again"...
That's the beauty of machines capable of making independent decisions: nobody is on the hook for what they do. Worse: nobody gets pangs of guilt over it, so they can be fully desensitized to what happened.
This must make the military all wet.
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If an aircraft pilot kills innocent civilians, the pilot gets court-martialed (at least in theory:
"At least in theory" translates, apparently, to "not". If an aircraft kills innocent civilians, what happens is that the military classifies all details of the event and says "we don't know anything about this".
https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
https://www.nytimes.com/video/... [nytimes.com]
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Human pilots are given rules of engagement and a list of targets to attack. If they obey those, they don't get court martialled no matter who they kill. An autonomous weapon is no different, although it might well be better at obeying the rules than a twenty-something jock on speed.
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Humans are more programmable than robots. Also, robots log everything. To do something illegal via robot would require more pre-meditation and multiple deliberate sign-offs. If a robot can be made to do it, a human in combat would agree to do it too.
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"Who's going to the slammer when the AI kills someone it shouldn't?"
The officer who ordered it deployed. Machines don't make independent decisions. They do what they're programmed to do. Humans decide what that is going to be, and send them off to do it. That's who goes to jail.
There's no difference between this and a self-driving car. Who goes to jail when a self driving car runs over a cyclist? The guy responsible for the car.
Who's getting wet over self-driving cars, Roscoe? Same technology, different job
Perfect Operational Record (Score:2)
You know what happens if they fly "... with a perfect operational record", right?
Fermi paradox (Score:3, Insightful)
That it is possible to be smart enough to breath, and so stupid that you can not see that this is a terrible idea, might be a possible reason for the fermi paradox.
Lets Play Global Thermonuclear War! (Score:1)
what side do you want?
The real threat (Score:1)
Named after Macross/Robotech but no Lesson Learned (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Really, they named it Valkyrie from Robotech
Now it's my turn to say "really?"
Really, they named it Valkyrie and your first assumption is that they named it after anime and not Nordic mythology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ? You know, the place where the anime writers most assuredly got the name from to begin with?
Maybe invest a bit more of your time in reality and a bit less in anime.
Easily disabled (Score:1)
I heard it just takes a cone shaped balloon.
as ~little~ as $3 million each? (Score:2)
AI the new buzz word (Score:1)
Has to be stopped by treaty (Score:2)