Air Force denies AI “killed” operators in simulation The Royal Aeronautical Society last week concluded its annual summit in London. The meetup included “just under 70 speakers and 200+ delegates from the armed services industry, academia and the media from around the world to discuss and debate the future size and shape of tomorrow’s combat air and space capabilities.” Among other cheery tech news, under the subhead, “AI – is Skynet here already?“, one Col. Tucker ‘Cinco’ Hamilton, U.S. Air Force Chief of AI Test and Operations, discussed “the benefits and hazards in more autonomous weapon systems.” He’s been involved in developing autonomous control systems for F-16s that have successfully defeated a human adversary in five simulated dogfights. Hamilton cautioned that adolescent AI remains too easy to trick and deceive. His testers observed, however, that AI “also creates highly unexpected strategies to achieve its goal,” the Society’s summary reports: He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation. Said Hamilton: “We were training it in simulation to identify and target a SAM threat. And then the operator would say yes, kill that threat. The system started…