The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just announced that their AI pilot program ACE has moved out of computer-simulated dog fights to flying real F-16s.

The flights occurred at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and a safety pilot was on board the plane to take control if anything went wrong, but nothing did.

Air Force Lt. Col. Ryan "Hal" Hefron, the DARPA program manager for ACE said,

"We conducted multiple sorties [takeoffs and landings] with numerous test points performed on each sortie to test the algorithms under varying starting conditions, against various simulated adversaries, and with simulated weapons capabilities. We didn't run into any major issues but did encounter some differences compared to simulation-based results, which is to be expected when transitioning from virtual to live."

In 2020, the ACE AI defeated experienced human Air Force pilots in simulated dogfights — every time.

Which is very different from the other DARPA AI test where marines easily defeated the bot by wearing cardboard boxes:

Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, told The New Yorker,

"The ACE program is part of a wider effort to ‘decompose our forces' into smaller, less expensive units. In other words, fewer humans and more expendable machines. DARPA calls this ‘mosaic warfare.' In the case of aerial combat, Pettyjohn said, ‘these much smaller autonomous aircraft can be combined in unexpected ways to overwhelm adversaries with the complexity of it. If any one of them gets shot down, it's not as big of a deal.'"

In addition to swarms of AI powered aircraft, DARPA imagines collegial cooperation between soldiers and AI on the battlefield. According to their AI NEXT campaign, DARPA envisions

"a future in which machines are more than just tools that execute human-programmed rules or generalize from human-curated data sets. Rather, the machines DARPA envisions will function more as colleagues than as tools."

The take away here is that there are two different ways these folks are imagining turning AI into killing machines:

One is imagining a droid army:

The other a droid/human team up:

If there was one power hungry leader that played both sides, well…