Out of interest once they reach a certain level of basic ability wouldn't it be easier to have them in "packs" rather than trying to basically replicate everything a human pilot can do in a single drone?

If you have a "pack" of drones big enough that a single enemy combat aircraft can't take them all down at once then if an enemy aircraft were to fire on a drone in the "pack" it could automatically be designated an enemy and be hunted by the remainder?

> AI isn't anywhere near being able to discriminate against an aircraft that is not exhibiting "aggressive" behavior. How will it work when it needs to visually ID an opponent, or when the opponent is flying aircraft that might be allied?

What will you do when the enemy sends up unmanned autonomous aircraft that ignore these niceties and shoot down all your manned fighters?

I'm not dismissing the legitimate problems you raise, but we need to prepare for war, which almost by definition is the absence of rules, such as distinguishing military from civilian targets.

EDIT: Also of interest, if an autonomous fighter shoots down a civilian aircraft, is it a war crime? Mistakes happen in war that aren't crimes. And if it is, who goes to jail?

It's enough for the drones to be semi-autonomous. The controllers mark detected airplanes as friend/foe manually, and on-board AI does the maneuvering and shooting.

Yeah, maybe it isn't easy to make the AI distinguish "aggressive behaviour", or even do good visual ID. But how's this for a use case: Simply declare a restricted airspace, where every plane needs to have transponder replying correctly to some challenge-response authentication protocol. Distribute transponders to allies. Tell about zone in the evening news, so that everyone knows. Then program drones to shoot down anything that doesn't respond correctly. I'm pretty sure that it's a lot cheaper to design and build drone with same performance characteristics as top A2A fighter, there's so much that you don't have to worry about: human rating everything (you don't have to make so damn sure that everything works without the hitch first time), all the control systems that you have to build the pilot an interface to (radar, etc.), the cocpit.. I'm sure those will easily pay for developing a competitive fighting-AI.