There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI) would transform warfare, along with pretty much everything else. However, would the change be apocalyptic or evolutionary? For the sake of humanity, let us hope it is the latter.
Technological innovation has always changed war. It has been that way since the arrival of chariots, stirrups, gunpowder, nukes and nowadays drones, as Ukrainians and Russians are demonstrating every day.
My favorite example (because it is so simple) is the Battle of Koeniggraetz in the 19th century, in which the Prussians defeated the Austrians, thus ensuring that Germany would be united from Berlin rather than Vienna. The Prussians won largely because they had breech-loading guns, which they could rapidly reload while lying on the ground, whereas the Austrians had muzzle-loading rifles, which they reloaded more slowly while standing up.
If AI were akin to that kind of technology, either the US or China, vying for leadership in the field, might hope to gain military preeminence for a fleeting moment.
As a military technology, though, AI looks less like breech-loading rifles and more like the telegraph, internet or even electricity. That is, it is less a weapon than an infrastructure that will gradually transform everything, including fighting.
It is already doing that. The US’ satellites and reconnaissance drones now capture so much information that no army of humans could analyze all of it fast enough to give the Ukrainians, say, useful tips about Russian troop movements in actionable time. So AI gets that job. In that way, soldiers are like doctors who use AI to guide them through reams of X-ray data.
The next step is to put AI into all sorts of bots that will function, for example, as automated wingmen for fighter pilots. A human will still fly a jet, but she will be surrounded by a swarm of drones using sensors and AI to spot and — with the pilot’s permission — annihilate enemy air defenses or ground troops. The bots will not even care if they expire in the process, if that is their fate. In that way, AI could save lives as well as cost, and free up humans to concentrate on the larger context of the mission.
The crucial detail is that these bots must still seek human authorization before killing. I do not think we should ever trust an algorithm to have adequate contextual awareness to judge, say, whether people in plain clothes are likely to be civilians or combatants — even humans are notoriously bad at telling the difference. Nor should we let AI assess whether the human toll required for a mission’s tactical success is proportionate to the strategic objective.
The existential question is therefore not about AI as such. Paul Scharre at the Center for a New American Security, an author on the subject, argues that it is instead mostly about the degree of autonomy we humans grant our machines. Would the algorithm assist soldiers, officers and commanders, or replace them?
This, too, is not a wholly new problem. Long before AI, during the Cold War, Moscow built “dead-hand” systems, including one called Perimeter. It is a fully automated procedure to launch nuclear strikes after the Kremlin’s human leadership dies in an attack. The purpose is obviously to convince the enemy that even a successful first strike would lead to Mutual Assured Destruction. However, one wonders what would happen if Perimeter, which the Russians are upgrading, malfunctions and launches in error.
So the problem is about how autonomously machines do the deciding. In the case of nuclear weapons, the stakes are self-evidently existential. However, they are still vertiginously high with all other “lethal autonomous weapons systems” (LAWS), as killer robots are officially called.
It may be that an algorithm makes good decisions and minimizes death; that is why some air-defense systems already use AI — it is faster and better than people are. However, the code may also fail or, more diabolically, be programmed to maximize suffering. Would you ever want Russian President Vladimir Putin or Hamas to deploy killer robots?
The US, as the furthest along technologically, has in some ways led by good example, and in some ways not. In its Nuclear Posture Review in 2022, the US said that it would always “maintain a human ‘in the loop’” when making launch decisions. Neither Russia nor China has made a similar declaration. Last year, the US also issued a “Political Declaration on the Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy.” Endorsed by 52 countries and counting, it calls for all sorts of “safeguards” on LAWS.
Not for their ban, however, and that is where the US, as so often in international law, could play a more constructive role.
The UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which seeks to restrict pernicious killing techniques such as landmines, has been trying to prohibit autonomous killer robots outright.
However, the US is among those opposing a ban. It should instead support one and get China, and then others, to do the same.
However, even if the world says no to LAWS, of course, AI would still create new risks. It would accelerate military decisions so much that humans may have no time to evaluate a situation, and in the extreme stress either make fatal mistakes or surrender to the algorithm. This is called automation bias, the psychology at work when, for example, people let their car’s GPS guide them into a pond or off a cliff.
However, risk has increased along with military innovation ever since Homo sapiens tied stone tips onto spears. So far we have mostly learned to manage the new perils. Provided that we humans, and not our bots, remain the ones to make the final and most existential calls, there is still hope that we will evolve alongside AI, rather than perish with it.
Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for The Economist.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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