Clip 047 | Will Drones Steal Pilot Jobs? | F16 and F35 Pilot

So I feel like I may get some pushback for this, but I feel like the days of the fighter pilot may be numbered, you know what I'm saying. I feel like we're going to we're seeing the implementation of drone aircraft. I mean, they've got a drone tanker out there refueling aircraft.

Now.

I feel like, and you know, you can tell me if I'm way off base or whatever, but I feel like what's going to happen is right now, we have our our air force is mainly man pilots, and we have drones that help out with ISR, with you know that surveillance and stuff like that. At some point, I feel like it's going to become one pilot man pilot with their three other drone aircraft flying with them, and they're kind of controlling whatever's going on. And then at some point we're going to be like, why do we even have the guy up there?

Just pull him out.

That's too dangerous, you know, because if he gets shot down, now we got to go rescue him, and there's all this other stuff. We could just put a drone up there. Do you see that happening? Do you see a day when kids are like grandpa. He was the last fighter pilot, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean someday for sure, I think, you know, at some point, I don't know when that that will happen. But it's not even close right now, not not even close. You know, combat is the most dynamic environment in the world, so when we go I think I think the biggest misconception that people have about flying fighters is it's this like one v one cage match. You're just going up dog fighting. I mean, top gun pretty much did that.

Four aircraft going into this uh you know this threat country. You know, that's that's crazy. We go in with one hundred different aircraft and each aircraft has their own specialty and it's not even aircraft like, it's multi domain. So you're talking about space, cyber, you're talking about guys on the ground, you're talking about ships, missiles, all these things integrated tightly, and things go wrong, and it really takes a person to be able to be creative with their solution to you know, there's going to be some fallout to bring this you know, team together to be able to solve the tactical problem. And the enemy, on the other hand, they're doing everything they can to disrupt your decision making. So you know, if you're going against a

drone that really only knows how to attack one way, they're going to find a way to attack that. And I think a lot of these tech companies are figuring this out. So like Tesla with their you know, automated driving. You know, they were saying five years ago that we're going to have fully autonomous vehicles. They're even their autopilots called full self driving. It definitely doesn't do that. Maybe on a highway, definitely, not through a city, Definitely not through a shopping center. And that's without an adversary. What if I were to tell you, all right, I need you.

I want you to design software to be able to take a car from LA to New York through New York, and then I gave you, I said, I need you to prevent that vehicle from getting there. You could do whatever you want. You can spray paint the lines into concrete barriers, you could use lasers to their cameras. You know, I'm sure you could find a way to prevent it from getting to that destination because it's exponentially more difficult to do that.

So I think.

Humans and AI drones. You know, I think the future is us working together. We have some huge strengths that we're able to overcome, and one of them is being able to creatively solve problems. Computers aren't great at doing that. They mostly use linear regressions, so they're going to, you know, just see what happened in the past and then forecast that for the future. So it's really us finding ways to work together, which is really difficult. You see that with a lot of autopilots on commercial airlines right now.

So the autopilot will kick off at the worst time and say, oh, I'm overloaded, I can't do this. Here's the pilot, and the pilot meanwhile, has gotten complacent because they're used to the autopilot doing that. So now they have to step into those crazy situation and solve it for the AI. So so in terms, so instead of seeing you know, all the AAI and tech companies saying and there's there's one tech ceo about six months ago who said, uh, basically, fire pilots are going to be obsolete in five years.

That's that's not how fast the DD operates. There's no way.

Out that any amount of money that's not going to happen. And I guess there's some proponents on the fire pilot side that that says, we don't need drones, we can do it all ourselves. And I'm I would say probably in the middle. We're going to go out with these drones, but we're ultimately going to be in charge of it.

So you can help mitigate risk. Maybe we'll stay a little bit further back and give the drones a little bit higher threat missions in there, but you absolutely need a pilot in the loop. And to say, you know, right now we have like m Q nine predators there. You know, pilots are flying from trailers in Vegas. I would say that anything is jammable. So if you need a signal to go from that trailer in Vegas all the way to you know, the the Yellow Sea, there's a lot of different avenues that you can use to jam that signal. So these drones or aircraft are gonna have to be able to make decisions on their own, and we're not even close to them being able to make all the decisions that a fighter pilot or you know,

any person can make on the fly. I would say not even not even a quarter of the way there, So maybe maybe in twenty one hundred.

You know, if I wow that far out, huh, if.

I was a betting man, maybe twenty one hundred is going to be the last of the fighter pilots. And as we get closer and closer, drones will do more and more things, but not even close.

Do you think it'll move Do you think it'll move into AI driven aircraft or do you think it'll become remotely pirate piloted aircraft first? I feel like it would become remotely piloted first, because why risk putting a guy out there if we don't have to. Oh we have that right now, we have the MQ nine's, So yeah, but an MQ nine is not enough sixteen.

Yeah, okay, remotely piloted fighters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, That's what I'm talking about on like a different level. I don't know, I just I see. You know, you mentioned in one of your other videos you talk about the S curve of like technology being going through it's like cycle of development and stuff like that, And I feel like we're where you're talking about, at the beginning of that S curve, where a lot of the mistakes are being make being made, a lot of the money's being used right now because we got to get a good foundation of understanding and like capability, like technological capability, before we can you know, push on to the things that we really want to do. I mean, would you agree with that? Do you think we're at the beginning of this rather than like farther along like

some people believe.

For sure, we're at the very infancy of this, especially when it comes to combat, especially when it comes to you know, it's yeah, especially when it comes to combat, we're at the infancy. We're at the very beginning of this s curve. So as opposed to trying to replace fighter pots with this you know, this technology that isn't fully developed, I would be a strong proponent of trying to find ways that it can help to augment the fighter pilot. And so yeah, that might be one pilot going out with a couple of drones being able to control them. You know, I think that's pretty useful. I think since the beginning of probably of the computer, So i'd say the you know, probably the F sixteen, first electric jet. They did a lot of things in that

aircraft that helped to automate things for the pilot.

One of them.

You know, with the with the flight control system, they had auto trimming, so it would auto trim wherever you wanted to go to one G.

So I mean that, you know, you.

Know, I'm sure they had to deal with F four pilots saying, you know, you're not you're not a real pilot, you're not a man, you know, flying that thing. You don't have to trim the thing. So now with the F thirty five, we've taken you know, a big step forward where it's able to automate a lot of the data management so that the pilot can really cleanly see the information and data. So I think, you know, you know, if I were king for a day, I would be investing heavily in AI but as a way to augment you know, pilots and use the best thing that we have is our brains to be able to make creative decisions.

That's what I would do. With maybe the ultimate goal, you know, in twenty eighty, we're talking, you know, super far away of fully replacing them, But if you're trying to, if you're trying to replace them right away, I think it's going to turn out like you know, the missiles in Vietnam where you know, they took the gun off the F four and they just had you know, air TOIR missiles on them, and they didn't work as well as they thought it would work.

So I think that, you.

Know, if you try to go in with a fully autonomous fleet, you know, that's what's going to happen right now. So, you know, just just having lived this life for for a while, I don't think we're even close to being able to go to a fully autonomous you know, air force. And I'm a big proponent of technology. I think that's you know, technical is augmented me. I'm able to fly one hundred times faster than I can run, carry a hundred times more, you know, much more capable than I could without this you know machine around me. But it's it's a whole different animal if you want it to do all this stuff on its own.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think, man, in the next twenty years, the changes in technology that AI is going to bring is going to be mind blowing.

You know.

That's why I don't know, I don't know. I don't know if twenty one hundred is I think that might be too far out. I think I feel like it could be sooner than that, just because of the rapid pace of technological developments. You know, it's going to be weird where something like that, like flight is going to become like a novelty. You know, like why would I why would a human ever fly a plane? That's crazy, that's crazy talk, you know. Yeah, Elon must have the same thing about cars. He's like in I think he said, in like one hundred years or whatever, people are going to look back and be like, I can't believe we allowed people to drive these monster machines themselves, these like death machines, you know what.

The thousand people a year die from that, I think, Yeah, one of the leading causes of death.

Yeah, so it's like the perspective we have on it's gonna be it's way different than the people of the future when they look back and be like, what, like, why would you ever do that?

That's crazy talk.

Yeah, It's like, you know, you had to hunt your own bison with with like a spear. You know, that's that's crazy to think about right now. So yeah, I mean twenty one hundred might be you know, I would say twenty one you know, and who knows.

There's so much uncertainty.

Involved with this, I'm just trying to illustrate the point that you know, it's going to be a lot of time, and it's gonna be that S curve where you know it's good, the inflection is going to go up.

We're going to make some really.

Seamless teams between AI, you know, wingman and aircraft, and then maybe you know, twenty eighties or something, it's going to be like, you know, we're gonna you know, there's going to be our grandchildren are going to have this conversation of like, you know, you're really not cutting it as a as a pilot anymore.

Maybe we can just get rid of you.

But to think, you know, these tech companies are getting billion dollar valuations saying that they can get rid of fighter pilots in five years, that's that's not going to happen. For example, F thirty five flu X thirty five flu in two thousand and one, it didn't get IOC initial operating capability till twenty seventeen. That's like sixteen year cycle.

I think the F twenty two was like a fifteen year cycle. You know, the development for these aircraft is crazy. It takes a really long time to be able to do that, and like in the DoD, the decision cycles to be able to change things is much slower. So maybe maybe a company like Apple or Google or Tesla could make a fighter in maybe twenty forty that can replace the fighter pilot. But imagine you know, having to go through the DoD and being able to go through the bureaucracy and then being you know, seeing the last you know, fighter pilot. You know, I would say, you know, if I if I were to bet, I'd say, twenty one hundred isn't isn't too bad?

Yeah, Yeah, I think you're right.

It'd be It'd be not unlike SpaceX coming in and being like, hey, we're just going to build our own rockets, you know, like you guys did all this over here.

That's cool.

We'll take what we know from that and just our own perspective, you know, coming coming at it from a completely different perspective rather than these career military people or career like engineer government engineer people working on a project. When you bring in a civilian sector side, they're just going to look at it in a different way, and you know, I don't know, maybe they will come in with some crazy could you imagine at Tesla, what would it look like, could be like an X wing fighter or something like that, because they'll bes is a big NERD.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it would be it'd be great. And that's I think. I think that's really where the DD is headed. I think in it was really the nineteen nineties that all the primes got you know, merged, and we went from like thirty primes to like three.

Locked you mean, what do you mean by primes?

Primes are like North of Grumman all these different air all these different companies that made different aircraft. So there's like thirty different aircraft manufacturers in the eighties and in the nineties we consolidated to really three major primes like Lockeed, Boeing, and North of Grummen. So basically, you know, you have three different companies. Boeing specializes in the big planes, Locked in the fighters, Northrop in the bombers, so you really know where the contract's going. So compare that to the civilian industry where you have you know, Apple, you have Google, you have all these different companies competing. Same with the car manufacturers. Competition is a great thing. And so I

think really the DoD recognized this at least in the late two thousands, and they've been really trying to bring in more civilian companies. That's that's what I was doing with the Defense Innovation Unit. They're like, all right, we have a lot of problems within the DoD. How do we bridge that gap and just get civilian companies to solve these problems for ten times cheaper. We don't need a you know, million dollar toilet seat, Like, how do we how do we get these guys to to just do a commercial off the shelf type application. So I absolutely think that that's the future. The difficulty is, you know, classified stuff really stokes, stove pipes things, So yeah, that makes it really difficult for you know, you know, just

an LLC to to go and try and you know build a new missile or something like that.

Yeah, for sure, you like what you're talking about where you're saying, like, how can we use this off the shelf stuff and make it work? Because that's really how we won like World War Two and these older wars is because none of the stuff was like so crazy technologically advanced, like a lot of a lot of this stuff was just easy stuff like ay Ford can make this pretty easily. Let's just have them, you know, let's have them do it. And and I like what you're talking about with the competition. You know, if we're talking about the car side, you have your big, big car manufacturers, you get your Forward, your GM and stuff like that, but there's so many like little tiny car manufacturers in the civilian market. Those aren't your only choices. You don't

have to go with one of those. So yeah, I think that could only bring Again, it's all about perspectives. If you're looking at defense stuff, you want to bring in multiple perspectives because there may be a big something that you're not seeing because you're you've only been looking at it from one way. And you bring in a smaller company that's one working in a different environment because they may not have the fiscal abilities that a giant corporation does, or they may have different kind of technologies that they're working with. They may see something completely different because of their perspective. So that's really good and it's good to hear that the government and the military understands that,

and they're putting together like whatuld you call it the defense.

What is it? The idea Defense Innovation Unit?

What all did you guys work with in that.

Or what you could talk.

We work with the physiological monitorings, so there's a whole bunch of different programs going on and the

Clip 047 | Will Drones Steal Pilot Jobs? | F16 and F35 Pilot | "Hasard" Lee

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