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It's interesting to think about! I've enjoyed this discussion.
Ironically I think a lot of this happens ~automatically now (I'm...not sure this is always good!)
Yep, but from what I understand most fighters have a feature to allow the pilot to depart controlled flight, in case he needs to. Can we program an AI to utilize such a feature responsibly? I dunno! I'm pretty sure we can program them to use it, I'm just not sure we can practically teach them when to read the rules. I'm not sure software programmers are the best people at figuring that stuff out. We might be able to do it with Deep Learning, though. But (as I've nodded to before) that essentially involves training AI to fight the fight you think will happen, which makes me uncomfortable enough when we do it for people. If the AI is capable of flexibly adapting if our model of the fight we think will happen, great! If not, that's when I start to get deeply nervous. People are pretty good at adapting, because they dislike dying.
Broadly agree with all of your other points about the good features of unmanned aircraft.
Yeah, from what I understand the US next-gen aircraft (NGAD) is also going in this direction – not necessarily (but maybe?) in the low engine life, but in terms of trying to make cheaper, more flexible airframes. But worth noting the MQ-28 can't go supersonic and, from what I can tell, doesn't have a radar or any munitions payload. I'm not super surprised it has a range advantage over the F-35.
I definitely think you can – this is what I find a bit concerning. Let's say you program the AI never to take a shot against a transponding civilian aircraft without getting VID. Great, if China finds this out, free BVR shots all day long. Whereas if you have a human in the loop, they can make a judgment call about that sort of thing. (This is particularly concerning, in my mind, given that there are a lot of overlap between civilian and military aircraft designs, particularly with regards to tanker and ISR aircraft. I definitely agree with you that humans goof stuff like this up, I think my concern is that the programmers and bureaucrats directing them would be tempted to try to make sure we never shoot down anything on accident again and then find that we've handcuffed ourselves to an unworkable or exploitable standard. (In my experience with LLMs, they are...not ready to be given access to weapons. I think a combat AI could be programmed to be less error-prone, but that's where my concern about the lack of flexibility comes in.)
Well, from my perspective, the question is "do we want to risk 100% of our air dominance on a technology that hasn't been used in air combat before," and my answer is "not really." And I'm not selective about this; I think it's good, for instance, that the United States has finally rolled out a new long-range missile, in part because range is good, but also because divergent designs lead to less risk – you have more than a single point of failure. I'm not saying we shouldn't attempt to utilize AI. I am saying that, until we are able to prove it at a very large scale (and ideally in combat), we shouldn't place all of our eggs in the one point of failure, whether it's AI, or a single type of weapons system, or a single plan to defeat any enemy. This is why I prefer to loyal wingman and optionally-manned programs to deciding that the age of humans is over – it hedges against known and unknown risks in a way you can't do if you don't procure any manned aircraft.
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