AI Warfare Is Boring but Deadly
Everyone knows what the AI apocalypse is supposed to look like. The movies WarGames and The Terminator feature a superintelligent computer taking control of weapons in a bid to end humankind. Fortunately, that scenario is unlikely for now. U.S. nuclear missiles, which run on decades-old technology, require a human being with a physical key to launch.
But AI is already killing people around the world in more boring ways. The U.S. and Israeli militaries have been using AI systems to sift through intelligence and plan airstrikes, according to Bloomberg News, The Guardian, and 972 Magazine.
This type of software has allowed commanders to find and list targets far faster than human staff could by themselves. The attacks are then carried out by human pilots, either with manned aircraft or remote control drones. “The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier,” an Israeli intelligence officer said, according to The Guardian.
Going further, Turkish, Russian, and Ukrainian weapons manufacturers claim to have built “autonomous” drones that can strike targets even if their connection to the remote pilot is lost or jammed. Experts, however, are skeptical about whether these drones have made truly autonomous kills.
In war as in peace, AI is a tool that empowers human beings to do what they want more efficiently. Human leaders will make decisions about war and peace the same way they always have. For the foreseeable future, most weapons will require a flesh-and-blood fighter to pull a trigger or press a button. AI allows the people in the middle—staff officers and intelligence analysts in windowless rooms—to mark their enemies for death with less effort, less time, and less thought.
“That Terminator image of the killer robot obscures all of the already-existing ways that data-driven warfighting and other areas of data-driven policing, profiling, border control, and so forth are already posing serious threats,” says Lucy Suchman, a retired professor of anthropology and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.
Suchman argues that it’s most helpful to understand AI as a “st
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