“This is the first time this has ever happened,” said Assistant Air Force Secretary Will Roper. It was relegated to highly specific tasks and walled off from the plane’s flight controls, according to people involved in the flight test. The two-and-a-half-hour test was performed in a routine training mission at Beale Air Force Base, near Marysville, Calif., starting Tuesday morning. For the purposes of the initial test flight, the AI got the final vote on where to direct the plane’s sensors, he said. An Air Force program called Project Maven sought to rapidly analyze reams of drone footage in place of humans.

Source: Washington Post December 16, 2020 13:36 UTC