Last month, some of the biggest names in technology signed a pledge promising not to develop lethal autonomous weapons. Coming just after the recent employee-led protest over Google’s Project Maven, some have praised these initiatives as ethical and moral victories. Some, but not all. For Sandro Gaycken, a senior advisor to Nato, such initiatives are supremely complacent and risk granting authoritarian states an asymmetric advantage. “These naive hippy developers from Silicon Valley don’t understand – the CIA should force them,” says Gaycken, founder of the digital society institute at ESMT, a Berlin-based business school.
Gaycken’s hard advice reveals a schism emerging in the future development of AI for military purposes. On the one side are those that believe pursuing the development of military AI will lead to an unstoppable arms race. On the other side, people like Gaycken believe the AI arms-race has already begun. For them, prohibiting AI research for military purposes will not lead to peace but give the upper hand to authoritarian systems. Therefore, if the West wants to stay in the lead, it needs to unify around a concerted strategy. “Within most military and intelligence organisations it’s a concern,” Gaycken argues. “And it’s about to become a much larger concern.”
If this race has already begun, the stakes are significant. AI’s pattern recognition capabilities, ability to judge and weigh probabilities and make sense of large amounts of data at speed, could confer numerous advantages to military and intelligence organisations. “Ultimately war is about decision-making. And AI, above all else, is a decision-making technology,” says Kenneth Payne from the defence studies department at King’s College London.
Machine learning tools will likely be applied across the whole spectrum of military operations; from improved strategic thinking, down to low-level tactical applications, like controlling swarms of autonomous unmanned weapons systems. However some of the most influential applications in a military theatre could be felt away from the battlefield. “It will play a key part in logistics, in the provisioning of armies to fight,” Payne says. “It may even play a part in weapons design: thinking about and testing what sort of weapons are likely to perform well in conflict with other AI weapons.”
The other domain in which AI is likely to play a decisive role is in future cyber conflict. Elsa Kania, an expert in Chinese military strategy, believes that machine learning will prove an essential tool in achieving “superiority across the electromagnetic spectrum”. Developing faster, more insightful AI could enable one side to enhance the communications and situational awareness of their forces. It could also enable them to disrupt, degrade and deny those of their adversary.
Developing superior AI cyber weapons will enable one side to identify and exploit computational weaknesses within an adversary’s ICT infrastructure. From a military perspective, this opens up a great deal of creativity. “You could attack a military command and control centre, you could attack military vehicles, weapons systems and platforms, you could attack entire battleships and even drones,” says Gaycken.
As AI cyber weapons move beyond speculation, militaries are beginning to formulate methods for their tactical and strategic use. Nato recently released a paper which lay the theoretical framework for “AI Cyber hunters” – defensive AI agents, which patrol friendly systems and detect enemy malware. Offensive AI cyber weapons are already in development, but in Gaycken’s opinion they are still rudimentary. Nevertheless, the advantages that superior AI grants, means that nations are trying to gain dominance in this area. But how exactly do we measure AI power? And is it clear who is winning?
Trying to measure AI power is no easy task.
