🦋 ✈️ AI Pilots 🛩
Airlines have 2 pilots on their planes for safety.The 2 pilots eat different meals so that they will not be both be affected by food poisoning. If anything happens to the pilot in flight, the co-pilot will take over.
Mid flight, the plane is put on Auto pilot where plane is completely controlled by computerised systems. However one of the pilots have to be on constant guard and ready to take over immediately if necessary.
Will AI one day enable the number of pilots to be reduced to 1 or 0?
With further advances in AI, the AI pilots will be better than human pilots. However for public relations purposes and also for safety, it is likely that there will be 1 human pilot.
A system malfunction might cause a plane to crash if there is no manual override by a human. No airline can take the public out cry if this ever happens.
Having full AI military planes is more likely. Using ground based simulations for F16 planes, highly experience fighter pilots of USAF have lost to AI.
Encouraged by these simulated battles, the USAF in last December has actually used AI to fly F16 planes that cost hundreds of millions.
China may not yet have such advanced simulators as the USAF. But they are catching up with the USA on AI piloting.
China has conducted actual combat battles between AI controlled drones and drones controlled drones.
The computational ability of AI systems exceed human ability. Everything that can be done is programmed into it.
Learning by AI enable it to anticipate what would be done by humans and be ready for it.
In one of the battles, the human moved into attack position first. AI knowing what the human will do reversed the situation.
The human went into a sharp dive to the ground hoping that the human will crash. Anticipating a last minute pull up, AI positioned itself for the pull up.
The human pilot tried other tactics such as “rolling scissors” – a sudden slow-down and change of course – hoping the AI would overshoot in the chase.
None of them succeeded
Like the USAF, China has found that AI will win dogfights between planes.
AI is superior in reaction speed.
AI is superior in computational ability and ability to anticipate. (Like in the case of grandmasters of chess V super computers)
AI is not affected by physical forces like G forces that hurts and can drain blood from a human brain when making extreme manoeuvres
The shortage of experienced pilots is a crucial limitation for airforces around the world.
Russia is not able to fully exert its air superiority over Ukraine because it does not have enough pilots.
Taiwan is buying a lot more fighter jets because of tension with China. It already has a shortage of pilots and its efforts to train new pilots is hampered by the need of trainers (current experienced pilots) to fly on missions to intercept Chinese planes. The pilots of Taiwan are being worn out by their work load.
The time will come when military planes will be piloted by AI.
