There are plenty of UAVs in military service with ground control stations in which the Windows jingle is heard when booting them up.

"Whether they care or not is irrelevant."

"Whether they care" may seem irrelevant to many people, but not me. The degree to which "care" is taken to prevent life-and-death errors truly matters. The amount of attention given and the measures taken to prevent and or manage error depends a lot on the "care" one takes. Granted, for robots, such "care" must be taken in the software development, but it is also taken when deciding how much authority is given to unthinking, uncaring automated tools, whether for control of an aircraft, control of weapons or most particularly control of targeting, and launching/dropping/firing lethal weapons.

I don't accept a General apologizing for a death due to "computer error".

We have the ability today to hit targets with autonomous flying machines. They're called cruise missiles. I hafta wonder what an autonomous aircraft that released precision guided munitions on a target add to the equation that a cruise missile does not?

KenV

Cruise missiles are not a cheap way to wage war, plus they are only a pre-planned mission, not reactive.

The cruise missile is also once-only.

I think you degrade your mission flexibility if you remove the easily reprogrammed human control unit from all of your aircraft. These bio-units occasionally make mistakes, but they are more easily re-tasked for changing tactics, they can use their imagination in an unexpected tactical situation, and so on. They can't be hacked and they can still operate when their controlling information system (aka radio data link) is being jammed.

Pilot-less civil aircraft would have one mission - to make the number of take-offs equal the number of landings and make the rest of the journey as smooth as possible for the paying luggage. For a strike aircraft it's not so simple...

DITYIWAHP

In general I might agree, but the bit about being hacked makes no sense.

An F22 is a flying computer. The consequence of being hacked is the same.

Tourist, I suppose I should expand on my imaginings (although I feel I need to tread carefully around this topic). If either system was to be hacked then you're right, the result could be mission failure for either platform - so no difference in loss. However, the F-22 has the advantage of a human who could save the machine / prevent nefarious weapon employment. Although the human would be a greater loss if the system was to be lost... It was just my mind rambling... :8

I don't really think the human could stop a hacked F22 doing anything....

I would be surprised if there was a single input he can make that doesn't go through a computer.

Well, humans were able to take control and fly their F-22s across the international date line after all of their computer systems shut down. Not sure if a pilot-less vehicle would have coped in a similar fashion.... You're presuming that a hack on a mission computer would equally render the aircraft un-flyable and un-navigable to a human and a computer 'pilot' system.

I have not heard about the incident to which you refer, but I was operating under the understanding that an aircraft like the F22 is absolutely unflyable without a computer to help, ie instant departure from normal flight.

I agree that none of these aircraft are flyable if their flight control systems are shut down - and I think that's where you're coming from. However, many of these aircraft comprise modular systems that can and are designed to work independently should the others fail (a proper fail-safe redundant system of systems), so any attack would have to be quite accurately targeted and delivered to bring a manned aircraft down. Indeed, such a feat might not be possible on a flight control system unless you can actually get your hands on a comm port (that's how I'd make it, anyhow). Designing the redundancy capabilities of other systems to cope when one fails is something I imagine the designers lose a lot of sleep over, especially when the number of possible failure modes could be huge...