Originally Posted by
DogTailRed2
I wonder if these new aircraft will have an autonomous option?
Ideally the computers should be taking so much load off the pilot that they will in almost every sense be autonomous, allowing the pilot to manage and focus on one thing while others are "being handled." When you think of what a basic drone can do now, the extra compute power that could be shoved into a much larger aircraft should be absolutely astonishing compared to what's flying today - even the F35 is ancient by modern standards. I doubt that such software will be trusted in costly aircraft so they will have to be man-managed for a decade or two.
At this point I should say I know nothing except for pointing out what is obvious to computing professionals and speculating on it.
To be sensible, the architecture is going to need a lot of flexibility built into it. We live in an age where you cannot afford stick with your old computer for years. AI is running on graphics cards now but like crypto there will probably end up being more and more custom chips with ever more astonishing abilities that will not need to be in a datacentre or be powered by nuclear reactors to appear to "think". They might actually be able to learn "on the hoof" and I think that will be extremely compelling.
The other temptation will be to offload everything - make the aircraft mediocre in the intelligence stakes and trust to being able to shunt information for processing elsewhere and receive instructions back. In reality I suspect that both will be wanted. We'll end up with a distributed/dispersed "battle ai" running everything AND autonomous aircraft.