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?

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.

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.

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:yeah we're always behind our 'adversaries'

[Lead Butthead]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.