Artificial Intelligence Transforms War

(San Francisco) China and the United States have stopped short of committing to banning lethal autonomous weapons, as some experts had hoped, after media reports of the issue emerged at Wednesday's presidential summit in California.

Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping have nevertheless agreed that their respective experts will discuss the risks associated with rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI), which are disrupting many sectors.

In the field of military equipment, this technology could constitute the third major revolution, after the invention of gunpowder and the atomic bomb.

Non-exhaustive review of AI applications in military equipment.

Autonomous weapons

Robots, drones, torpedoes… thanks to technologies ranging from computer vision to sophisticated sensors, all kinds of weapons can be transformed into autonomous systems, governed by AI algorithms.

Autonomy does not mean that a weapon "wakes up in the morning and decides to go to war," says Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This means they have the ability to locate, select and attack human targets, without human intervention."

These lethal autonomous weapons systems are also nicknamed "killer robots," a phrase that evokes androids straight out of science fiction.  

"This is one of the options being explored, but in my opinion it is the least useful of all," the specialist notes.

Most of these weapons are still ideas or prototypes, but Russia's war in Ukraine offers a glimpse of their potential.

Due to telecommunications issues, armies have been pushed to make their drones more autonomous.

As a result, "people are going underground," Russell notes, and this foreshadows a major change in the nature of war, "where being visible anywhere on the battlefield will be a death sentence."

Autonomous weapons have several potential advantages: efficiency, low-cost mass production, no human emotions such as fear or anger, no radioactive crater in their wake, etc.

But they raise major ethical questions in terms of evaluation and commitment.

And above all, "since it does not require human supervision, you can launch as many as you want," stresses Stuart Russell, "and therefore potentially destroy an entire city or an entire ethnic group in one go."

Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous submarines, boats and aircraft are intended to provide reconnaissance, surveillance or logistical support in dangerous or remote areas.

These vehicles, like drones, are at the heart of the "Replicator" program launched by the Pentagon to counter China in terms of personnel and military equipment, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region where the United States is trying to regain power.

The goal is to deploy several thousand "low-cost, easily replaceable autonomous systems in many areas within the next 18 to 24 months," Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in late August.

She cited the example of space, where such devices "will be launched by the dozens, to the point that it will be impossible to eliminate them all."

Many companies are developing and testing autonomous vehicles, including California-based Anduril, which touts its human-free submarines as “optimized for a variety of defense and commercial missions such as long-range oceanographic sensing, underwater battlespace awareness, mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare,” and more.

Tactical software

Powered by AI and capable of synthesizing mountains of data collected by satellites, radars, sensors and intelligence services, tactical software serves as powerful assistants for general staffs.

“The Pentagon needs to understand that in an AI war, data is the ammunition,” Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said at a congressional hearing in July.

“We have the largest fleet of military hardware in the world. It generates 22 terabytes of data per day. If we can organize that data properly to analyze it with AI, we will have a pretty insurmountable advantage in terms of using this technology for military purposes.”

Scale AI has won a contract to deploy a language model on a classified network of a major U.S. military unit. Its chatbot, “Donovan,” is designed to enable commanders to “plan and act in minutes instead of weeks.”