2023-11-16 21:15:57
Direct last minute of the war in Ukraine
As gunpowder and the atomic bomb did before, artificial intelligence (AI) has the capacity to revolutionize war again, according to analysts, transforming human confrontations in ways that were previously unimaginable and much more lethal.
The integration of this technology into military weapons, vehicles and computer programs has modified the lines of combat in conflicts such as the one in Ukraine and also threatens to change the competition for global supremacy between China and the United States.
The issue had arisen before the summit that the leaders Joe Biden and Xi Jinping They held this Wednesday in California and there had been speculation that both could agree on a ban on the use of lethal autonomous weapons.
However, no such agreement occurred between the leaders of the United States and China, who left their teams of experts to continue analyzing the application of this technology that can revolutionize the war scenario in the air, sea or land.
Western experts maintain that Beijing is investing massively in AI, to the point that it will soon could change the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region, and perhaps beyond.
And that will mean deep changes in the world order long dominated by the United States.
“Death warrant”
Robots, drones, torpedos and other devices: thanks to technologies ranging from computer vision to sophisticated field sensors, all types of weapons could be transformed into automatic systems controlled by AI algorithms.
But autonomy doesn’t mean a weapon can “wake up in the morning and decide to start a war,” he noted. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of Berkeley, California.
“It means that they have the ability to locate, select and attack human targets, or targets that carry human beings, without human intervention,” he explained.
The killer robots of numerous science fiction stories and movies are an obvious example and have been analyzed. Although Russell considers that perhaps “that is the least useful.”
Many weapons are still in the prototype phase, but the war that develops after the invasin rusa from ukraine offers a sample of the potential of this technology.
Remotely piloted drones are not new, but they are gaining more autonomy and are used by both sides, forcing troops to look for more underground shelters.
That could be one of the biggest immediate changes, according to Russell. “A likely consequence of having autonomous weapons is that basically being visible anywhere on the battlefield would be a death warrant“, opin.
Autonomous weapons have potential advantages on a military level: they can be more efficient, they are cheaper and they lack human emotions, such as fear or rage, present in combat. But all those advantages generate ethical problems.
For example, if it is cheap to manufacture, there is virtually no no limit in the offensive power of an aggressor, according to Russell.
“I can just throw a million of them at once and if I want I can decimate an entire city or an entire ethnic group,” he said.
Autonomous vehicles
Submarines, ships and autonomously operating aircraft could be a great advance in surveillance or logistical support in remote or dangerous areas.
This is the objective of the “Replicator” program, launched by the Pentagon to counter China’s powerful numerical supremacy in troops.
The objective is to be able to send several cheap and easy-to-replace systems quickly in different scenarios, said the United States Undersecretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks.
He explained that if numerous devices are “launched into space at the same time… it becomes impossible to remove or degrade all of them.”
Many companies develop and test autonomous vehicles, such as California’s Anduril, which has an autonomous submarine “optimized for various defense and commercial missions,” such as long-range oceanographic detection, underwater battlespace reconnaissanceanti-mine maneuvers, seabed mapping and anti-submarine warfare.
tactical programs
Controlled by AI and capable of processing endless data collected by satellites, radars, sensors and intelligence services, tactical software can offer humans a real breakthrough in military planning.
“Everyone [en el Departamento de Defensa] “You need to understand that information is actually the ammunition in an AI war,” he highlighted. Alexander Wanghead of the programming company Scale AI, during a hearing in the US Congress this year.
“We have the largest fleet of military equipment in the world. This fleet generates 22 terabytes of data a day. So if we can properly configure and instrument that information that is being generated in groups of data sets for AI, we can create a information advantage quite insurmountable with regard to the military use of artificial intelligence”, detail.
Scale AI has a contract to develop a language model in an intelligence network of an important unit of the United States Army.
Its chatbot (conversation agent), named ‘Donovan’should allow managers to “plan and act in a matter of minutes, instead of several weeks,” the company maintains.
However, the United States diplomatic chief, Anthony Blinkenalready stated that there are limits, as in the case of decisions to use nuclear weapons.
#Artificial #intelligence #transforms #battlefield