End of the Manned Fighter? U.S. Air Force to Pit Pilots Against Revolutionary AI Piloted Jet in 2021

Amid growing speculation that the U.S. Air Force intends to deploy AI piloted aircraft for a frontline combat role in the coming decade, the service has announced plans to pit an advanced pilotless and unmanned aerial vehicle against a piloted plane in an aerial match-up in 2021. Coming as the U.S., China and Russia have all unveiled models of their future unmanned fighter designs, the intention of the exercise is to pave the way for using AI to fly fighter jets in future. Lt General Jack Shanahan, the head of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Centre, touted the Air Force’s decision as a “bold, bold idea”. He underlined that the coming decades wound likely see machines and airmen working together in what he said would make a “big difference”. The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) will try to field “an autonomous system to go up against a human, manned system in some sort of air-to-air,” according to Shanahan. Artificial pilots can present a number of benefits over human ones, including the ability to pull extreme manoeuvres which would leave a human unconscious, the ability to take over 1000 times more hours of experience into combat than is possible for a human pilot, and the ability to be integrated into lighter aircraft which lack the cockpit space or life support systems of manned fighters and can thus be made more efficient.