Within a few short years, crucial
warfighting decisions — even whether to launch a nuclear weapon — could be made
by autonomous machines.
By Michael Klare, December 19, 2018. Originally published
in TomDispatch.
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There could be no more consequential
decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear
holocaust.
President John F. Kennedy faced just
such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of
1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear
exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough
barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and
other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not
just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision.
That was then, of course, and this is
now. And what a now it is!
With artificial intelligence, or AI,
soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually
everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear
decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some
future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to
determine humanity’s fate.
This isn’t idle conjecture based on
science fiction movies or dystopian novels. It’s all too real, all too here and
now, or at least here and soon to be.
As the Pentagon and the military
commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a
highly contested battlefield — some have called it a “hyperwar” environment — where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic
weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human
commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought,
commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent
machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where.
At first, this may not extend to
nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the “firebreak”
between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to
prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making.
Such an outcome can only grow more
likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intended to
transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization
back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This
shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy.
Rather than focusing mainly on
weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending
small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight
increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional
(air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack
systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human
oversight.
“The major effect/result of all these
capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen
before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of
processes traditionally required to wage war,” observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI
entrepreneur Amir Hussain. “In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans
providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing,
and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands
of individual decisions with no additional input.”
That “minimization of human
decision-making” will have profound implications for the future of combat.
Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle
to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to
avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very
smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and
political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations
of uncontrolled escalation.
It may be years, possibly decades,
before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but
that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons
systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview,
“For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element. Maybe
for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100.”
Why AI?
Even five years ago, there were few
in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or
robotics when it came to major combat operations.
Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA),
or drones, have been widely
used in Africa and
the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely
ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S.
commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In
addition, today’s RPAs are still controlled by human
operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of
AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however,
such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans
in many or even most combat functions.
To speed this transformation, the
Department of Defense is already
spending hundreds of
millions of dollars on AI-related research. “We cannot expect success fighting
tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s thinking, weapons, or equipment,”
Mattis told Congress in April. To ensure continued military
supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more “investment in
technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into
advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics.”
Why the sudden emphasis on AI and
robotics?
It begins, of course, with the
astonishing progress made by the tech community — much of it based in Silicon
Valley, California — in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image
identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice
Services, is the computer system behind Amazon’s smart speaker that not only
can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (“Alexa,
play classical music.” “Alexa, tell me today’s weather.” “Alexa, turn
the lights on.”) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize
transportation.
Artificial Intelligence is an
“omni-use” technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service,
a non-partisan information agency, “as it has the potential to be
integrated into virtually everything.” It’s also a “dual-use” technology in
that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving
cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an
array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to
take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured
versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future
battlefields.
Similarly, someday drone aircraft —
without human operators in distant locales — will be capable of scouring a
battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants),
determining that something it “sees” is indeed on its target list, and
“deciding” to launch a missile at it.
It doesn’t take a particularly nimble
brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology:
they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between
the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be
extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands
of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused in densely packed
battlespaces.
In such an environment, speed in
decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical
asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first
will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing
adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but
future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more
battlefield variables.
As General Paul Selva, vice chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2017:
“It is very compelling when one looks
at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and
accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics
might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine
interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence.”
Aside from aiming to exploit AI in
the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely
aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the
weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome America’s advantages
in conventional weaponry. According
to the Congressional
Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development
of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though
lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly
rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian
lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this country’s military
superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon.
Not surprisingly then, in the fashion
of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold
War nuclear weaponry), an “arms race in AI” is now
underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain,
Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the
weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials
regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking
congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military
officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects.
In true arms race fashion, this
dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of
AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare.
Command and Control
As this arms race unfolds, artificial
intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and
surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will
accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy
positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command
centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines
and surface ships.
At the outset of combat, all these
instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting
intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines
may well be lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already
being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further
human intervention.
Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future
battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully
autonomous weapons — sometimes called “killer robots” — with a capacity to make
life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems
would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish
between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from
harm to the greatest extent possible.
Advocates of the new technology claim
that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for
themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making
critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to
show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian
organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban
on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems.
In the meantime, a perhaps even more
consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of
AI to command-and-control (C2) systems — that is, to ways senior officers will
communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to
maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic
intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era,
such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications
systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However,
strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such
systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to
exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the
data, and dispatch timely orders.
Consider this a functional definition
of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence — with defeat
a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let
the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional
Research Service puts it, in the future “AI algorithms may provide commanders
with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space,
which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events.”
And someday, of course, it’s possible
to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human
ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be
channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the
time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best
options without human instructions.
Pentagon officials deny that any of
this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however,
that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate
decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit,
lest it lose the strategic high ground. “We will not delegate lethal authority
for a machine to make a decision,” then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert
Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American
Security in a 2016 interview.
But he added the usual caveat: In the
future, “we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to
delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds,
we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.”
The Doomsday Decision
The assumption in most of these
scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war
with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a
future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional
conflicts could cross a threshold that’s never been crossed before: an actual
nuclear war between two nuclear states.
And should that happen, those
AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position
to launch atomic weapons.
Such a danger arises from the
convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but
the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at
five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and
high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI
surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemy’s
mobile retaliatory weapons and so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to
any nuclear attack.
Given such a “use ’em or lose ’em”
scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at
the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an
uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines.
And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further
escalation.
The question then arises: Would
machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation?
They certainly are capable of
processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing
the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner.
But machines also make military mistakes and,
above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop
this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation.
As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None,
a new book on AI and warfare, “Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize
with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous
weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions,
no ability to step back from the brink of war.”
So maybe we should think twice about
giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a
machine-made Armageddon.
Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch
regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security
studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control
Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His
next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and
American National Security, will be published in 2019.
Issues: War & Peace
Regions: China, Russia, United States
Tags: AI, artificial
intelligence, drones, nuclear weapons
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