By any chance your profession is related to military aviation?
Am (ex)USAF. F-111 Cold War, then F-16 Desert Storm.
I follow Gonky and Mover from their youtube channels. They pretty much say same the stuff like you. "There has to be a man in the loop".
I want to bring another argument to that. Today, there is no human being that can beat an AI in the chess. Similarly there is no human being that can beat an AI in the GO game.
In the future, at some point AI will replace the pilot. But we don't when.
That is a fair argument. The issue is that combat has uncertainties and variables that games cannot anticipate in their rules. Basically, combat has no rules. Other than the Geneva Convention stuff, of course.
When I was active duty and way back in my F-111 days, I learned what I considers, to this day, the most valuable lesson about combat:
In a fight, you win not by fighting under your opponent's rules, but by forcing him to fight under yours. And cheating is allowed.
If your jet have superior climb rate, keep the fight vertical. If your jet have superior turn rate, keep the fight horizontal. If your jet have superior radar, keep the fight long distance. And so on. Basically, any feature and capability is a rule. Not every jet is superior to everything, although, I know the F-22 guys would argue otherwise. The point is that you do whatever you can to keep the other guy under
YOUR advantages while staying out of his. It sounds easy but actually is far harder to do.
Ultimately, it comes down to the pilot, as in how well he knows his jet
AND how educated he is about potential adversaries. That is why we have Top Gun, Fighter Weapons School, and Red Flag to put pilots under near combat stresses when they found themselves under the instructors' virtual guns in the air. I been to two Red Flags. I seen foreign pilots exited their cockpits literally shaking from adrenaline and fear because their home countries never had something similar.
Now back to Artificial Intelligence in jets...
Am not saying that after this shooting fight between Iran and Israel is over, we will do away with UAV of every kind. In fact, am confident that we will continue in that path of further UAV development. But from what we learned from this first air skirmish between UAVs and manned fighters, is that the current state of UAVs is best against ground forces, not yet capable against manned fighters. That is
NOT a criticism against Iranian UAVs. Since the advent of UAVs doing many things, from delivering packages to gathering military type intelligence, the world have been waiting for this day where a real world fight occurred. Not UAV vs UAV but UAV against the human. And the UAV lost.
We now know that in order for UAVs to be effective, they have to be supported
JUST AS GOOD as how we support the humans. The game board have finite borders but in the air the limit is fuel. Vastly different factors. The board's borders are fixed, but fuel can be replenished even in the air. The game board have fixed numbers of contestants per side and the pieces are always clearly visible and definable, but not so in wars. There are many more variables but am certain you get the idea. An AI is only as good as whoever can think up these variables and program them in, but the problem here is human wile, instincts, intuition, and often just sheer muleheadedness that logic cannot deal with, and these variables cannot be programmed in. But then, when these intangible qualities of being human are constrained by rules and environment of a game, of course the human will
ALWAYS lose.
So what would happen if UAVs have increasing sophistication of their AIs? The UAV itself will have to get more sophisticated in order to do more than just threaten ground troops, right? Then as the UAV gets more sophisticated, the AI will become just as needy as the humans the AI is supposed to replace. Now we go back to square one: The human.
Whenever there is a new technology, the optimism will swing to one extreme, then when there is a real world situation where the technology is tested, reality swing the pendulum back to the other side. We just experienced a real world event.
Personally, I think the 'Loyal Wingman' concept is the appropriate middle path for UAV and (not versus) manned platforms. The variables of war and combat demand those intangible qualities of being human, but now in command of the computing power of an AI equipped UAV.