The US Military Desperately Wants To Weaponize AI (technologyreview.com)

Artificial intelligence is a transformative technology, and US generals already see it as the next big weapon in their arsenal. From a report: War-machine learning: Michael Griffin, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, signaled how keen the military is to make use of AI at the Future of War 2018 conference held in Washington, DC, yesterday. Saber rattling: "There might be an artificial intelligence arms race, but we're not yet in it," Griffin said. In reference to China and Russia, he added, "I think our adversaries -- and they are our adversaries -- understand very well the possible future utility of machine learning, and I think it's time we did as well."

Comments

john connor

[ganjadude]

where is he when we need him?

Re:john connor

[Anonymous Coward]

where is he when we need him?

Check out the T-2000. He thinks he can trick us into revealing the location of our glorious leader by not using capitalization and going by the name ganjadude.

stupid headline

[cascadingstylesheet]

I knew even before I looked that I would find reasoned discussion of the need to deal with enemy capabilities, not "desperately wants to weaponize".

Sigh ...

Re:stupid headline

[myth24601]

I take most issue with the use of the term "desperately" when there doesn't seem to be any hint of desperation. That term was put in to put bias in the mind of the reader against the military.

Colossus: The Forbin Project

[PPH]

"May your every wish be granted."

-- Ancient Chinese curse

Defense department needs enemies

[DNS-and-BIND]

The threat from Russia and China is completely overstated. China has a big clunky military and Russia is a thin crust of good troops backed by worthless conscripts. Both are totally surrounded by multiple layers of US bases. All hysteria aside, the threat is well in hand already. But it's hard to get a man to acknowledge something when his funding depends on him not acknowledging it.

Re: Defense department needs enemies

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, the $700B-$1T "defense" spending is the number one threat to the US existence.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[mi]

Russia can lose 300+ people and go on like nothing happened. America would pull out after losing fewer than that... To prevent the mission from failing due to public opinion turning American generals want to keep losses to absolute minimums — and that's why they want machines to do the fighting.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[ShanghaiBill]

America has overwhelming military superiority today. But what about a decade from now? China is investing heavily in AI, and doing so without the moral hand wringing occurring in the West.

We need to invest in AI, and stop wasting money on manned weapons like the F-35 and CVNs. We also need to prepare diplomatically for living in a world of military parity. China wants all the rocks in the South China Sea. Should we be willing to go to war to stop them? I don't think so.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[farble1670]

You mean by actually getting more of NATO to kick in $$ to the pot?

That's one way to look at it. Another is that NATO countries are allowing the US to stage weapons and troops on their soil... knowing that they will be first strike targets, not the US. Now let's get them to pay for the privilege.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[AlanBDee]

In other words, weaponizing AI is going to happen one way or another. Then the real question is do we want to live in a world where Russia or China has the military dominance in the world? The U.S. definitely has it's problems but of the large countries that can have a large military I can't think of any that I would trust more to have military dominance over the world.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[farble1670]

Why should America subsidize the defense of wealthy First World countries?

NATO provides a HUGE military advantage to the US for any conflict with either Russian or China. The US's missiles, tanks, bombers, drones, etc are hundreds of miles from the target, vs. thousands for Russia / China (except maybe Alaska). The US is paying for the privilege of that advantage. Maybe you remember a little thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis where the USSR came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war with the US just to try and level the tables in this regard.

I get it, you are trying to make it sound like NATO is a charity mission between the US and all others involved. That's simply not the case.

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[farble1670]

NATO benefits the US in a large way. Having a global military is what allows US corporations to profit, by doing things like propping up friendly dictators in areas where we need the natural resources, or need to maintain trade routes, or where they can oppose our adversaries. We're not children. Do you think the US has military bases all over the world, in the name of truth and justice for all? Of course not. It's for profit.

The Middle East is the most obvious example. We get out of Iraq. We stop supporting Israel. Friendly oil nations are overrun with fundamentalists. America is held hostage by oil prices. Our economy tanks. It happened in the 70s it can happen again.

There's also the thinking that maintaining some amount of stability with small conflicts is better than world war. The US was hands off of europe prior to WW1. Then WW2. We know what happened there. Ever since then we've maintained a presence in europe.

Whether we should continue down the road of a globally dominant military is a question, but just make sure you are deciding based on facts and the advice of people like economists and military generals. Trump is a failed business person,
http://www.businessinsider.com...

and a draft dodger.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...

Do you trust him to direct your military and economy?

Re:Defense department needs enemies

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Europe does not need the US in NATO to defend Europe -- they can defend themselves just fine and the Pentagon knows it. The US needs Europe in NATO to defray some of the costs of American interventionism. The US needs Europe if it wants a credible ability to counter Russian actions in Eastern Europe.

The European nations are spending a smidgen over 2% of GDP on military expenditures, which is ballpark the same amount as China spends. When China spends 2%, it is dangerous expansionism. When Europe spends 2%, they are total wimps.

Oh come on

[Anonymous Coward]

There is not a thing the US military does not want to weaponize. It's what they do.

The rationale is just there to clothe the thing a bit, the gist is always the same. "Can we weaponize this?" And yes, yes they did, including boring old business machinery mounted in trucks for battlefield use back in the 50s.

Doesn't make the headline less superfluous though. This state of affairs is a given.

Re:Oh come on

[Rei]

What do you do when weapons without AI go south? Same thing. Innocent people die. The point of AI would be to decrease the odds of innocent people dying, not increase it.

First off, all "skynet" stuff aside, we're not talking about "generalized AI". We're talking about stuff like image recognition. Not learning neural nets, just pretrained ones. Secondly, this would be most desirable serving as a backup, not primary, control mechanism. One of the big problems faced by drones is jamming. If a drone gets jammed and you're lucky, it has to return to base autonomously without completing its mission. If you're unlucky, bad things happen. For example, US-made surveilance drones given to Ukraine met with bad reviews because the Russians - oh, I'm sorry, "rebels" - were using advanced electronic warfare systems to down them, and then downloading the images from memory to see where the Ukrainian positions were.

You want a drone that does whatever you want tell it to so long as you can maintain communications with it, but if someone jams your communications, you want it to carry out whatever mission you assigned to it as best as it can.

Beyond drones, AI would be very useful in missiles / guided artillery / etc. You find a target, you lock onto the target, and you want to ensure that the missile hits the target - whether the target is a tank, a plane, a group of soldiers, or whatnot. Your "targets", in turn, deploy a variety of countermeasures to try and make sure that the thing you shot gets confused and can't find it. Simple human-created algorithms describing how to determine what's your target and what isn't can only take you so far; having a neural net which is trained to recognize various types of targets - and various things that aren't targets - can make the weapon much more effective, while reducing the risk of it impacting a non-target object.

Then there's just general surveillance / monitoring. The more visual data you collect, the more manpower it takes to analyze it. But if you train neural nets to recognize weapons systems - from camouflaged tanks to guns in people's hands (trained *against* non-gun items which people might carry) - it can narrow down the imagery that humans need to look at when determining what should be targeted and what shouldn't.

To reiterate: in none of this are we talking about "generalized AI". We're not even talking about "learning AI". We're talking about "AI pre-trained to specific tasks". Which are things we already use in our everyday lives.

Yes

[NotT-2000]

Tell me more about this John Connor you speak of.

Keep a human behind every shot.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very important a human is put behind every possible weapon, it leave some MINOR wiggle room for disobeying orders that can save the day. Imagine a dictator/president waging war from his office computer.. No-one to stop the command to launch nukes or destroy a nation... At least with a pilot/target'r they can use a judgement call, this looks like a school.. or no, I'm not going to shoot all these humans standing in a row, or can identify a child walking across a no-go zone vs an automated(anything that moves drop weapon)... Sure most soldiers throughout history follow orders anyway, but at least it should make a mark on their souls(to be a speaker of wisdom when they are aged perhaps). Machines taking over the trigger... Theres nothing to feel, to know just what is taking place.

imo.

Re:Keep a human behind every shot.

[ShanghaiBill]

It is very important a human is put behind every possible weapon

If we do this, and our adversaries do not (and they will not), then we lose.

The ethical debate about "humans in the loop" is not happening in China and Russia.

Re:yeah we're always behind our 'adversaries'

[Lead Butthead]

"Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!"

Because China

[Koreantoast]

While the Pentagon has been dabbling for a long time in artificial intelligence in areas like autonomy and analytics, there's been a newfound urgency because of very active Chinese PLA efforts to incorporate AI into all aspects of their military.

The PLA anticipates that the advent of AI could fundamentally change the character of warfare, resulting in a transformation from today’s “informatized” () ways of warfare to future “intelligentized” () warfare, in which AI will be critical to military power. The PLA will likely leverage AI to enhance its future capabilities, including in intelligent and autonomous unmanned systems; AI-enabled data fusion, information processing, and intelligence analysis; war-gaming, simulation, and training; defense, offense, and command in information warfare; and intelligent support to command decision-making. At present, the PLA is funding a wide range of projects involving AI, and the Chinese defense industry and PLA research institutes are pursuing extensive research and development, in some cases partnering with private enterprises. Battlefield Singularity: Artificial Intelligence, Military Revolution, and China's Future Military Power

Indeed, the Chinese have been much better than many other countries, including the United States, in coordinating government, academia and industry in AI research. Whereas in the US, there is still a lot of friction between leading private sector AI companies and the DoD, in China, they are in lock step. And unlike other peer adversaries in the past, China is approaching parity, or even exceeding, Western nations in AI development.

They used mercenaries

[rsilvergun]

which is why nobody cared. We have a mercenary army too now. It's run by Betsy DeVos' husband. And neither of us know how many have been killed off the books.

But even if we ignore that our government learned from 'Nam. How much coverage of dead Americans overseas have you seen? A: Almost none. They used to take pictures and run video whenever their coffin's came off the plane. That's not allowed anymore.

Re:They used mercenaries

[mi]

They used mercenaries, which is why nobody cared.

The distinction you are trying to make is without difference. Russians did seem to use mercenaries in Syria's most recent engagement, but they used regular troops in the past few years too — with major losses. Also, in Syria they've lost several aircraft (with pilots) to merely a whimper back home. It is also a common practice for Russian military to produce backdated discharge documents, whenever a service member is killed or captured — to present him as a "contractor" or "volunteer", who quit regular military a few days before the event. They've done this so much, nobody cares for it any more.

Moreover, the very profession of "military contractor" is highly illegal by Russian criminal code — and no one cares for that either. These people are described as "contractors" to the West, where such thing is legal, but back home the heavy losses are simply officially denied. Most citizens know the truth, but don't care.

We have a mercenary army too now.

Whether we do or not, TFA is about American military — and their desire to use machines.

And neither of us know how many have been killed off the books.

Whatever it is we know about ours, Russians certainly know too about theirs. They just don't care — not as much. The level of disapproval hundreds of dead Americans would cause here, requires thousands deaths in Russia.

How much coverage of dead Americans overseas have you seen? A: Almost none. They used to take pictures and run video whenever their coffin's came off the plane. That's not allowed anymore.

I am not aware of any law banning it. Are you?

Anyway, the point was, Americans are a lot more sensitive to losing people, than Russians are — and this sensitivity causes American generals to reject weapons, tactics, and strategies Russia would find perfectly acceptable.

If you disagree, please, state your disagreement and substantiate any facts. If you don't disagree — then stop ranting.

Dr. Strangelove FTW

[PvtVoid]

Muffley: But this is absolute madness, Ambassador. Why on earth would you build such a thing?

Russian Ambassador: There were those of us who fought against this. But in the end, we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And at the same time, our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap.

Muffley: This is preposterous! I've never approved of anything like that!

Russian Ambassador: Our source was the New York Times.

Say... That's a nice bike...

[NotT-2000]

Do you have a photograph of John? Just need to ask him a few questions.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Lesson on proper spin

[mi]

Enlisted commit suicide more than they are KIA.

Our military is so superior, American soldiers are more likely to kill themselves, than be killed by an enemy. FTFY.

let's play global thermonuclear war

[Joe_Dragon]

What side do you want?

1. US
2. Russia
3. United Kingdom
4. France
5. China
6. India
7. Pakistan
8. North Korea
9. Israel