No Terminators Coming …. Yet Out of Loop” Defensive AI Could Save Lives

Video Above: Attack Robots, Autonomous Weapons, Drones & the Future of AI

By Kris Osborn,  President, Center for Military Modernization

In an interesting interview recently on CNN, former President Barack Obama was asked about the future of AI and the various philosophical, technological and ethic variables now dominating discussion as AI-technology explodes and many consider its implications. While being clear to emphasize that AI continues to bring paradigm-changing innovations to the world, he used succinct language to sum up what is perhaps the most significant complication or challenge when it comes to the application of AI …. “Machines can’t feel joy,” he told CNN. 

 Obama said this in the context of describing how the advent and rapid arrival of new applications of AI continue to change things rapidly bringing seemingly limitless new promise and also introducing challenges and complexities.  He was quick to praise the merits of AI in his discussion with CNN, but also mentioned the challenges or limitations, given that uniquely human attributes such as emotion, devotion and other more subjective phenomena can’t be approximated by machines.  True enough, and while defense industry innovators and critical Pentagon institutions such as the Air Force Research laboratory are making progress exploring ways AI can somehow estimate, calculate or analyze more subjective phenomena, there are clearly many variables unique to human cognition, intuition, psychological nuances, ethics, consciousness and emotion which it seems mathematically-generated algorithms simply could not replicate or even begin to truly approximate accurately.  This is why leading weapons developers are quick to explain that any optimal path forward involves a blending or combination involving what could be called the Pentagon’s favorite term .. “manned-unmanned teaming.” 

This, however, does not mean the merits and possibilities of AI should be under-estimated, as senior researchers with the Army Research Laboratory have explained that “we are at the tip of the iceberg” in terms of what AI can truly accomplish.  This is why the Pentagon is measuring the rapid success and promise of AI in the context of non-lethal defensive force. The combination of human decision-making faculties, when coupled with the speed and analytical power of high-speed AI-generated computing, is already creating paradigm-changing innovations. Imagine how many lives a defense AI-weapons system could save? AI is also already massively shortening the sensor-to-shooter curve in key modern warfare experiments such as the Army’s Project Convergence. 

These complexities are the main reason why there continue to be so many technological efforts to improve the “reliability” of AI-generated analysis, so that, through machine learning and real-time analytics, machines can determine context and accurately process new material that might not be part of its database.  This, as described to Warrior by former Air Force Research Laboratory Commander Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, is the cutting edge new frontier of AI. 

“AI today is very database intensive. But what can and should it be in the future? How can we graduate it from just being a database to something that can leverage concepts and relationships, or emotions and predictive analyses? And so there’s so much more that we as humans can do that AI cannot? How do we get to that?,” Maj. Gen. Heather Pringle, former Commanding General of the Air Force Research Lab, told Warrior in an interview earlier this year.