Attention Fighter Pilots: Your Job is at Risk

So, when do we get Fembot Fighter planes?

hey arent we suppost to be living on the moon already.

Its too bad that Lockheed, regardless of its record of evil things, doesn't have as ominously evil of a name as Cyberdyne or Skynet.

Of all the movies from my youth that could have come true, why does it have to be Terminator 2?

Skynet is already online its plotting the
destrution of mankind already (JK)
but in all truth its hard for me to believe that a robot can do a job better than a man

Gaining sentience is probably not gonna happen, but what about it being taken over by someone with bad intent?

You'd be amazed at the rate at which progress is being made in reverse engineering the human brain, and the fields of AI and robotics. In narrow fields of expertise, AI has ALREADY surpassed the human brain-box. Enormous leaps have been made in modeling human (or any) intelligence since Freud birthed Psychology, the study of how and why we think (and feel) the way we do. And mind you, he was still alive last century. To the informed observer, we will be witnessing the arrival of a concious, artificial entity within our lifetime. Gives you something to sleep on, eh?

-Johnny
Undergrad. MIT Media Labs :P

PS. Oh, and as for "but what about it being taken over by someone with bad intent?"

That's a big "IF", as iffy as "what if someone took over the US military?" "What if the Secret Service is penetrated by an Islamic militant sleeper-agent who's holding the President Hostage to Iran?" "What if we lost the Cold War?" "What if someone purchased or stole anthrax former Soviet Union weapons labs?" "What if an alleged madman is trying to coerce the US with ballistic nuclear weapons?" ... What if someone crashed a 400 metric ton airliner-turned-missile into a multibillion dollar building in the middle of NYC, killing thousands and spurred the US into a $600 billion war on terror halways around the globe?

They're all possible "IF"s. The last two are real. That's life, this is the real world. We can always try to protect ourselves, or preclude investigating certain technologies and inhibit their proliferation so that we dont have to. Humanity has always been under an existential threat, either from pandemics, climate disaster, nuclear holocaust, asteroid impacts, or Acts of God, but we've managed OK so far.

Welcome to the future

Makes you wonder what is being experimented with in the black budget programs.

That MIT undergrad thing is a nice touch. Is undergraduate your official title? If you wrote a book right now would you write, “By Johnny Polowski Undergrad MIT Media Labs"? No offense. All I have to say is: "I, Robot". Read it.

Randolph
MIT Applicant Mechanical Engineering

To the MIT Applicant... you are too hilarious :-O Criticising someone for posting that they go to MIT (Ad Hominem), and you haven't even started your career... lol

As for the subject at hand. Having taken advanced courses in neurology and semiconductor physics, I unfortunately have to say that we are still far... far... away from the reproducing genius of the human mind!

The fear of robots taking over the world... is just a displaced fear of the change occurring to our world through technology. An example of this, is how the best universities (MIT included) are just now beginning to teach robots how to walk. Other challenges such as reproduction, conscious, and developing a deep seeded hatred for their creators (Another displaced hatred of God!) have to be left to the minds of fictional stories :-(

I leave this war to the pens of your imagination, with the eternal hope that you forever strive to prove me wrong.

Yours truly,

Lucas Forget M.Sc. (Eng.)

Do you really think that a machine could do a better job than a human? If any of it were true don't you think men would have already been replaced by vibrators? Its complete hogwash ... Ugh just don't talk to my ex-girlfriend.

As far as people loosing their jobs to a computer, that is already happening, just look at your local grocery store or Wal-Mart. Self checkout lines!?! Besides the whole world being taken over by machines? I think too many people have been watching The Matrix to often. Everyone knows that the world of the future everyone is going to have a flying car, meals come in pill form, and the world is ruled by those DAMN DIRTY APES!!!!

The article doesnt say anything about the planes being able to think for itself but that it have pilotless remote-operation capabilities. Meaning the pilot would not get killed if the plane is shoot down saving the Government money because that dont need to train a new pilot for every one that dies.

A robot doesn't have to be able to do everything a human can do in order to be a better fighter pilot. Robots would have a significant advantage over humans in air combat simply by being able to tolerate higher G forces without blacking out. Of course humans will still be better able to recognize a target, and different a real target from a friendly aircraft, a civilian aircraft, or a crayon drawing of an aircraft.

A few things need to be addressed from the above convo's.

1.) most things involving technology go through leaps an bounds with exponential rates of growth separating the technological lul's...my point is most people extrapolate linearly because of what we have now but the growth/intelligence of machines will likely explode at some point reaching great heights very quickly. It's happened already and after a slow growth it will happen again. ie the microprocessor development. So give Mr. MIT undergrad some due respect for what I consider to be inevitable and unpredictable.

2.) If one does create a machine that has true A.I. hence is a sentient being. The "ghost in the machine" effect will likely be a factor in the lack of perfection of such a complex neural network...since the "ghost in the Machine" effect can be traced down to quantum mechanics/string theory it is a fundamental theory that even computers will have flaws...therefore the next question is who has more flaws machines or humans...and that's just a logic comparison... where do emotions come in..they cause imperfections in logic or maybe just a different perspective...ref. "I, robot"

3.) As a tip to all who use titles for credibility. Intelligence matters, it wants to solve problems and can adapt to any scenario...titles show just a difference in choice....almost anyone of basic intelligence, a chance, and enough drive can achieve a title….not a sign of True Intelligence.

True intelligence is seen in the collective that is human thought/action...every individual is stupid in some way.

You know it is one thing to have an unmanned recon vehicle, and another to have a fighter, which will have to make hundreds of decisions on its own. What I see are the people, who used to be pilots, will now instead be techs sitting behind a console, helping this unmanned vehicle, when it makes a questionable decision. Computers can make simple calculated decisions, but we are still millenia away from getting them to think the way we do. It took us millions of years to develop our brains. AI is nowhere close.

You know it is one thing to have an unmanned recon vehicle, and another to have a fighter, which will have to make hundreds of decisions on its own. What I see are the people, who used to be pilots, will now instead be techs sitting behind a console, helping this unmanned vehicle, when it makes a questionable decision. Computers can make simple calculated decisions, but we are still millenia away from getting them to think the way we do. It took us millions of years to develop our brains. AI is nowhere close.

The future will have war played out like video games.

A computer that thinks like a human? Consider that our computers operate with the transitor as the main component. Three connections in a switch that is either on or off. The human brain? Neurons that have tens of thousands (some even hundreds of thousands) of connections that can be full on or full off or possibly any one of a thousand positions in between. We are a LONG way from that! Not to mention the "software" that drives it all. Keep dreaming AI guys!

I think it is a brilliant move from Lockheed-Martin to make the F-35 capable of autonomous and remote operations. Think of it- If you have an attack-group of manned and unmanned fighters, you can really push the envelope in high-risk actions. The non-piloted plase can do much faster turns and do the rally hairy stuff that one encounters. The piloted planes can perform those tasks that need the human touch on site to make the difficult split-second decisions- attack or stand down to avoid collateral damage and to lead the pack.

In my mind there is no question of taking out the human factor out of the equation, because even the unmanned airplanes have humans at the end of the final descision. But the unmanned and autonomous aircraft can take over in the boring stuf of flying to the action several borig hours of ding virtually nothing. It also can outperform human presence in dogfights and evasive action when attacked by being able to pull way more loads than any human body can. It can also take far more payload by avoiding the need for all the hardware to support human presence.

No- Wonderful strategy and a very logical one- One might say even a very evolutionistic approach of Lockheed-Martin.

This does resemble in a way those first hybrid fighterplanes that had both piston-engines and jet-engines...

To Sam, who posted 18 Aug at 3:50pm:

1) As a note on capitalism, an economy is NOT a jobs market. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people lost their livelihood when the demand for skilled horse care-givers plummeted with the mass-production of horseless carriages. Thank you, Mr. Ford. The economy is driven by demand for products and services, not jobs. (Human) piloting skills will eventually fall out of high demand. Despite their protests, pilots will not forestall the impending AI revolution. c'est la vie. That's life, this is progress.

2) "There are those who said this day would never come. What are they to say now?" -Halo 2 ;)
Trains as a major mode of transportation is impossible because the air will be sucked out of the cars at speeds >20mph. Rocket engines will not work in space because there's not air to push against. "Hey, Chris. When do you think we'll fall off the edge of the earth?" We've done the impossible. Enough said. Formerly ludicrous ideas are becoming common sense. "
Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.
L. Frank Baum"

3) "techs sitting behind a console, helping this unmanned vehicle" Tech: at first, is very expensive, and marginally functional. Then, it becomes marginally affordable and performs moderately well until… It works very well and is virtually free. All information technologies progress like this. Cellphones, laptops, computational density and speed, voice recog software, data storage and organization and transfer, etc. But none of this is linear! Since the invention of the transistor, it took decades to break the 1 Ghz 'barrier', but only several years to surpass 3 Ghz. Not only is progress advancing exponentially, the rate of advancement is as well.

With that said…. Yes, it took Darwin millions of years to evolve our brains… but we're not creating AI through evolution.

"Computers can make simple calculated decisions" Untrue. Many commercial apps can play the Stock Market better than humans with a lifetime of experience, and any stock broker will tell you that it's not 'simple.' Some applications of AI involve solving multivariable scenarios in realtime. The shear number of possible scenarios and variables make programming for every "What if" impossible, and would indeed take a millennia. Here's an example: AI piloting a heavily damaged 747. Hundreds or thousands of miles of electrical wires, thousands of subroutines, and an infinite number of possible malfunctions, or modes of sabotage, cannot all be accounted for. Instead, a program can, in a few minutes, learn the degree of damage to the aircraft, and a proper flight profile to safely land the plane. Yes, computers can learn. Nature created us, but we aren't limited to its tools and mechanisms, only our own collective, (and perhaps, augmented) ingenuity.

To :
Rob | August 18, 2006 at 01:16 PM

"Of course humans will still be better able to recognize a target, and different a real target from a friendly aircraft, a civilian aircraft, or a crayon drawing of an aircraft." If you told me that five years ago, I'd agree with you because you would be right. Our brains loan themselves to pattern recognition, thanks to our massively parallel brains (instead of one processor handling the info from all our senses, we have trillions of much slower ones to simultaneously process it). But that technology is advancing quite rapidly as well. Proposed face-recognition cameras at airport security is one example.

"I leave this war to the pens of your imagination, with the eternal hope that you forever strive to prove me wrong."

Amen.

I gaurentee that a computer/robot could do a better job than a human in the area of military flight. A computer can identify a target and react long before a human could do it. We're already using this technology. Some of the planes we test at my job have missile avoidance that will react to a missile once it senses it. This includes chaff, flares, and/or maneuvers. They are programmed to know what to do in many different types of situations, depending on what kind of missile, it's altitude, etc, the planes will react automatically, without human instruction.

Plus there are alot of things that a human simply cannot do. High G maneuvers, nanosecond decisionmaking, etc.

Frank
Data Technician, China Lake NAWS, Electronic Combat Range

The DARPA Grand Challenge price has already been cashed, with means that, with any luck, we'll see fully automated tanks in the next decade, and perhaps the first fully automated civilian vehicle a decade after that.

I'm so glad to be only 25 years old. I can still remember my first computer: a 386 running Win.exe version 3.1, and that didn't even need a heat sink on the processor. Today I have an LG MC-800c (Chocolate) cellphone which has about as much processing power as that computer used to have, yet is so small that I have to make an effort not to loose it.
I wonder what will I see by the time I'm an old geeser ready to croak. To think that Doom 1 was taxing for my old computer 15 years ago, yet Doom 3 cannot be processed at its finest by today's computers, running a zillion times faster than those.

By the way, people, are you quoting "I, Robot" by Issac Asimov, or that crappy Hollywood movie? The only high point that movie had was that Susan Calvin was a through and through robotpsychologist; everything else is the perpetuation of all the things that Asimov despised the most, starting with the "Frankeinstein Syndrome".

Ignacio Ramírez
Sustainable Tourism Undergrad
UCARIBE

This is all well and good to have robots do things for us. I'm a huge fan of robot slaves doing all the work for us so we don't have to! Hello! Utopia magic!

But I have a few problems with the science of AI - first, as a social scientist I must ask - who is conceiving of Intelligence (the I in AI)? I'm convinced that Intelligence is not fully understandable nor knowable and it is certainly not something that can be quantified - like IQ tests need any more debunking. If it is scientists who are deciding what intelligence is, then I'm not worried of robot revolutions at all because we will never make AI of that sort, just machines with "evolving" (evolution being another process we can't understand except in hindsight as it is) programming to adapt to the tasks we give them. There's nothing of the Asimovian "Three Laws" here.

I think we are too bogged down in metaphors conflating machinery and biology. Neurobiologists/psychologists have no problem talking about how the brain is "wired" and neuro pathways as if they are wiring. There's nothing wrong with these metaphors as long as we remember that machinery are simulacra of life based on our conception of life, our observations, our imaginings, and our assumptions.

AI is certainly artificial, not convinced that it can ever be intelligence though. Intelligence is seated in our capacity as social creatures. A computer can beat a guy at chess, but it can't really conceive of a situation in which it would be beneficial to lose on purpose, for political reasons. A human would know that in some cases it might behoove one to lose on purpose to ingratiate oneself to a boss, etc.

Intelligence and it's nuances belong more in the realm of PoMo and Existentialism than in science. Learning is only half of intelligence.

So it should perhaps be A1/2I.

That said, I'm positive thatb weapons should not be the first things to be robotized. Sure human error can account for the bombing of a wrong (civilian) target (in Southern Lebanon, say), but even as a learning machine, these are still machines built by humans with their errors. Also, in the eventuality of a robot revloution, perhaps we should just start off building them without guns.

This has been Andy D.

^^
As robotics progress, I refuse to see robots as slaves, prone to some kind of abuse, instead why not start now by seeing them as co-workers for a more rich and efficient and just society.

Correction:
As robotics progresses,...
Sorry.

No offense, but there seems to be a serious lack of focus in these comments. While some of you noticed this article is on an aircraft. While only partially automated it is still being told exactly what to do by the operator. So there's little to worry about the uav mistaking a commercial aircraft from a target.

I do appreciate the acknowledgement that at least some pilots are still better than any technology we currently have, but I am not against a hybrid force of uav's and conventional fighters. Because no matter how well the aircraft is built/designed the missles targetting them are still faster and they're getting smarter. I am only worried that as previously mentioned wars will be more like games and people will not be held responsible for the "what if?" incidences.

PS- If you've got a problem with my spelling, "stick it." I'm an Aerospace Engineer Major, not an English Major.

Undergrad. at Cal Poly Pomona (What? Everybody else is doing it?)