Like gunpowder and the atomic bomb before it, synthetic intelligence (AI) has the capacity to revolutionize warfare, analysts say, transforming human confrontations into tactics that were a thing of the past and much deadlier.
The integration of this generation into the military’s weapons, vehicles, and computer systems has shifted the lines of war in conflicts like the one in Ukraine and also threatens to disrupt the festival for global supremacy between China and the United States.
The issue arose ahead of Wednesday’s summit between leaders Joe Biden and Xi Jinping in California, and the hypothesis had circulated that the two could reach an agreement on banning the use of lethal autonomous weapons.
However, such an agreement did not take a position between the leaders of the United States and China, who abandoned their positions as experts to continue analyzing the application of this generation that can revolutionize the war situation in the air, sea or land.
Western experts say Beijing is investing heavily in AI, to the point that it could soon shift the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, and perhaps beyond.
And it would mean profound adjustments to the global order long ruled by the United States.
Robots, drones, torpedoes and other devices: With technologies ranging from computer vision to complicated box sensors, all types of weapons can be transformed into automatic systems controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms.
But autonomy doesn’t mean a gun can “wake up in the morning and start a war,” said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“This means that they have the ability to locate and engage human targets, or targets carrying human beings, without human intervention,” he explained.
The killer robots in many science fiction stories and videos are a clear example of this and have been analyzed. Although Russell considers it “the least useful”.
Many weapons are still in the prototype stage, but the war that unfolded after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is giving a glimpse of the benefits of this technology.
Remotely piloted drones are new, but they are gaining autonomy and are being used on both sides, forcing troops to seek out more underground shelters.
This may be one of the most important changes, according to Russell. “A very likely outcome of the autonomous weapons lifestyle is that being visual anywhere on the battlefield would amount to a death sentence,” he said.
Autonomous weapons have potential for the military: They can be more effective, they’re cheaper, and they lack the human emotions, such as worry or anger, that they provide in combat. But all of them raise moral problems.
For example, while it’s reasonable to do so, there are virtually no restrictions on an attacker’s offensive power, according to Russell.
“I can throw away a million at once, and if I do, I can decimate an entire village or an entire ethnic group,” he said.
Autonomously operated submarines, ships, and aircraft may be just a first step forward in surveillance or logistics in remote or dangerous areas.
This is the purpose of the “Replicator” program, introduced through the Pentagon to counter the harsh numerical supremacy of China’s troops.
The goal is to be able to temporarily ship systems that are reasonable and simple to upgrade in other scenarios, U. S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said.
He explained that if many devices are “launched into space at the same time . . . they will all be eliminated or degraded. “
Many corporations are emerging and testing autonomous vehicles, such as California-based Anduril, which has an autonomous submarine “optimized for defense and advertising missions,” such as long-range oceanographic detection, underwater combat space reconnaissance, mine countermeasures, seafloor mapping, and mining countermeasures-submarine warfare.
Controlled by artificial intelligence and capable of processing a myriad of knowledge gathered through satellites, radars, sensors, and intelligence services, tactical software can offer humans a true breakthrough in military planning.
“Everyone [in the Defense Ministry] will have to understand that data is really the ammunition in a war against AI,” Alexander Wang, director of programming company Scale AI, said during a U. S. congressional hearing this year.
“We have the largest military fleet in the world. This fleet generates 22 terabytes of data per day. So if we can properly set up and equip the data generated in groups of knowledge sets for AI, we can create a significant data advantage. in the military use of synthetic intelligence,” he explained.
Scale AI has a contract to expand a language style in an intelligence network for a primary US Army unit.
Its chatbot, called “Donovan,” allows managers to “plan and act in minutes, rather than weeks,” the company says.
However, the head of US diplomacy, Anthony Blinken, has already announced that there are limits, as in the case of the use of nuclear weapons.