The use of AI systems making decisions about who lives and dies
completely changes the entire frameworks
on which we base war.
As AI redefines our world...
AI, AI, Artificial intelligence.
A new type of warfare is emerging
and we're seeing it take shape on the battlefields of Ukraine
with superpowers vying for AI supremacy, many experts fear
we're hurtling towards an unstoppable arms race.
The worst case scenario is that warfare has accelerated.
to a point where nobody can control what is going on.
Is it too late to rein in the rise of artificial intelligence?
War has a particular set dynamics:
Bluff, retreat advance...
All of these things were true 12,000 years ago when we were fighting in bands of hunter gatherers
and they’re true now as we're lobbing hypersonic missiles at each other.
To the untrained eye, Ukraine looks a lot like any major land war of the past century.
But look closer and there is one transformative factor in this conflict - operational speed.
One way of describing AI in
in weapon systems is automation.
And the reason we want automation in weapon systems is because it makes them faster.
And in war, if you can do things quicker than your enemy, then you're at a huge advantage.
Let's use artillery as an example.
Russia has more guns and they have used their firepower advantage
to blanket Ukrainian positions.
But Kyiv says it is countering Russia’s numerical advantage by being nimble, quick and accurate.
And it's made possible, they say, by artificial intelligence.
Ukraine and their Western allies are constantly gathering a live
feed of images from thousands of drones and satellites.
Intel from spies working behind enemy lines, as well as videos and pictures
shared by ordinary Ukrainians to a government chat bot
and on social media.
intelligence analysis is effectively pattern spotting, and pattern spotting
is something that AI systems are really, really, really good at.
Instead of human analysts trawling through this massive data, AI
models trained to find objects of interest in images are constantly
processing it all to build an intelligence picture of Russian positions.
They have an image, run it through analysis and it will tell them accurately,
where the enemy tank is, for example.
After AI models identify a potential target, that information is sent
to a Ukrainian military commander who decides whether to attack.
This US tech company claims their AI
is the digital brain of Ukraine's targeting system.
Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Peter Theil
in the wake of the Iraq war and works closely with the US
military using data and AI to locate targets.
Now they’ve released details of their next generation AI platform.
AIP unleashes the power of large language
models and cutting edge AI for defense and military organizations.
They say this tool will be like a military chatbot - offering commanders real-time strategic advice from simple inputs.
Generate three courses of action
to target this enemy equipment.
The AI system will analyse a battlefield and offer options for the best plan of attack based on the data
Generate a route from Team Omega to the enemy equipment.
So critical decisions, which may have taken hours, might now be made in a matter of minutes
Destroy the enemy equipment.
The company says their systems will act ethically and within the law, require human oversight and crucially, cannot independently carry out an attack.
But the technology to build fully-autonomous weapons already exists
And with speed a decisive factor in battle
some fear platforms like AIP are another step towards making machines
the ultimate decision makers in war.
If a serious shooting war starts and one side is using AI systems
to make quick decisions about who's killed, the pressure will be on the other side to immediately adopt those style of systems as well,
because otherwise they will get wiped out.
In the future, when you have AI systems competing against each other,
we don't really know what war is going to look like.
That is such a huge unknown.
Palantir’s CEO says the West risks falling behind its rivals if they don’t supercharge their investment in artificial intelligence.
Not everyone is convinced, though.
To go as far as to say whoever has the most powerful AI
will have a superpower, if you will,
I think that's going a little too far.
And it's a very useful narrative for those,
of course, who want to sell the technology.
There's also doubt about whether these cutting edge systems can deliver
on the hype in the chaos and confusion of battle
There’s a very shiny, very futuristic idea:
if we have enough data and we have enough AI, problems of the world will be solved.
The reality on the ground
is that most military organizations operate with limited resources.
Underneath the slick visuals and PR, at the heart of any AI
model is data.
And without enough clean data, AI
systems make mistakes.
Getting reliable data about a messy and highly dynamic context of conflict
is very, very difficult.
There’s always a margin of error in AI systems.
To bring these systems into a realm in which matters of life and death are at stake strikes me as irresponsible at this point.
The problem of trustworthiness has not been solved.
The problem of reliability has not been solved.
A measure of caution is required.
But demand for evermore powerful AI
products has caused Palantir’s stock price to soar.
And they're not the only ones.
Artificial intelligence is projected to add trillions of dollars
to the global economy
in a few short years, and no country wants to be the one left behind.
The US National Security Commission told its military to invest tens
of billions of dollars in AI
China has laid out plans to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030.
And Vladimir Putin says whoever gains a monopoly in AI will, in his words, be the “ruler of the world”.
These are the words of a megalomaniac.
The reality is that the enemy has a vote.
And if you are trying to
develop these systems that dominate the world, will then so are they.
So we're in a classic arms race situation.
So, is it too late to avoid an age of AI conflict?
For years, scientists and tech leaders have been warning
about the dangers of AI
and autonomous weapons, and the UN
has tried to get members to agree on how to regulate so-called killer robots.
Without success so far, though.
But with a wave of powerful new
AI tools recently released,
international lawmakers are now scrambling to put up guardrails.
If you think war is bad
now, you should try it without legal and ethical frameworks
If an AI system kills civilians, who is it
that then goes up against the War crimes tribunal.
Without clear accountability, experts fear the worst.
An AI system can only identify objects.
And in this objectification is also a sense of dehumanization
We know from the history of warfare and the history of violence
that the more dehumanization plays a role
in a conflict, the greater the atrocities committed.
The world
has faced existential threats from devastating weaponry before,
though, and countries have pulled themselves back from the brink
with negotiations and treaties.
The same focus and cooperation
will be needed to stop the AI arms race from spiraling out of control.
We have lots of experience of how these arms races end.
They either end in both sides realising it’s gone too far and they cannot control the systems - or they end in catastrophic war.