[ExI] Artificial intelligence is changing every aspect of war

[BillK]

A new type of arms race could be on the cards
Sep 7th 2019
<https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/09/07/artificial-intelligence-is-changing-every-aspect-of-war>

Quotes:  (Long article)
The latest deep-learning systems can be the most enigmatic of all. In
March 2016, AlphaGo, a deep-learning algorithm built by DeepMind, beat
one of the world’s best players in Go, an ancient Chinese strategy
game. In the process it played several highly creative moves that
confounded experts. The very next month, China’s Academy of Military
Science held a workshop on the implications of the match. “For Chinese
military strategists, among the lessons learned from AlphaGo’s
victories was the fact that an AI could create tactics and stratagems
superior to those of a human player in a game that can be compared to
a war-game,” wrote Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese military
innovation.
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“What do we do when AI is applied to military strategy and has
calculated the probabilistic inferences of multiple interactions many
moves beyond that which we can consider,” asks wing-commander Keith
Dear, an RAF intelligence officer, “and recommends a course of action
that we don’t understand?”
-----
Western governments insist that humans will be “on the loop”,
supervising things. But even many of their own officers are not
convinced. “It seems likely humans will be increasingly both out of
the loop and off the team in decision-making from tactical to
strategic,” says Commander Dear. The expectation that combat will
speed up “beyond the capabilities of human cognition” recurs in
Chinese writing, too, says Ms Kania.
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That's the critical point! Not only that AI strategy might be too
complex for humans to understand - it will all happen too fast for
humans to process. An AI enabled war might be over before humans
realise that it has even started.
Though that points out the need for AI enabled defence systems as well.

BillK