JimmyBlonde

Yes! Phantom phorever!

Well the Terminator and Hal are science fiction. Isaac Asimov was a science fiction writer so his "laws" don't mean diddly in the real world even though they make great reading. If you don't perpetuate the vicious circle you become a victim of it, idealism is notoriously vulnerable to small arms fire but, it might be the case that a truly sentient AI might itself refuse to be a weapon.

Yep, but you can probably run an AI in simulation mode until it gets it right I guess. I guess an AI has to be autonomous by definition and to be able to pass a Turing test and qualify as an AI so it must be indeterminable from a real person. That basically makes it a person for all intents and purposes which kind of makes the topic, and the proposed ban, a bit of a joke if you ask me. You might as well ban thunder or the tide from coming in. Far be it for me to second guess Stevo Hawking and that Chomsky guy (What kind of name is Noam anyway? It sounds like something you find under tree bark.) but even if we do make an AI and then we don't weaponize it, guess what? Someone else will and we will be at a disadvantage. Sad but true. Besides, there's not much point in banning stuff, that just makes it more expensive.

Yes, it's obviously much better to have a flaky, emotional and unpredictable human controlling weapons than it would be to have an efficient and indifferent robot or AI program that only uses them under strict and incorruptible criteria. Never mind that humans would be in control of any robot anyway so the point is moot really, pulling the trigger by programming an AI to do it or by paying a uniformed biological operator to do it amount to the same thing. To paraphrase Jeremy Clarkson. "If computers controlled all the weapons it would probably be a good thing since they wouldn't ever work."

Well, it was ugly (unless you like manly planes), rugged, carried a lot of things that went boom and was called the "Thunderbolt". Good enough for me.

Yeah, I kind of missed what sub forum we were in and went off the title on my own little tangent. The P-47 gets my vote since it is the spiritual predecessor to the A-10 and deserves a place in DCS just for that IMO. Besides, it's hard not to love the Jug.

As far as projects that have been mentioned I'm very interested in the Hawker Sea Fury. For purely hypothetical, the F-104 Starfighter would be a real challenge. From the poll, P-47. I need to feel good about myself and parking next to a jug in a P-51 accomplishes that.