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| Science & Technology |
| Artificial Intelligence And The Future Of War |
| 2025-12-31 |
| [Hoover Institute] The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown the world that a new technology is now affecting the battlefield: artificial intelligence (AI). The Ukrainian and Russian armies are using AI to help locate and identify targets, pilot drones, and support tactical decision-making. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shown the world that a new technology is now affecting the battlefield: artificial intelligence (AI). The Ukrainian and Russian armies are using AI to help locate and identify targets, pilot drones, and support tactical decision-making. Similarly, the Israel Defense Force has used AI in those roles to identify and locate Hamas leadership, command centers, and patterns. The introduction of AI to warfare has shown that the technology can and will increase the speed and scale of violence, resulting in effects that are both impressive and troubling. Integrating AI into warfare renders human oversight difficult in some cases, impossible in others, and in a sense, places the conduct of war into the hands of machines, intelligent or not. No longer confined to automating manual labor, machines are beginning to automate human reasoning. Understanding how this transition will, and should, fit into war is one of the defining problems of our time. However, introducing "thinking" machines into war is not that new. Militaries have been attempting it since World War II at least. One of the most famous founding fathers of computer science, Alan Turing, became a household name by imagining how machines might think for humans and thus solve problems at greater scale and speed than humans can. The first pieces of this work were at Bletchley Park where Turing and his companions were working on breaking the German Enigma Code using new computers like the Bombe and the Colossus. Turing’s following work on computers as thinking machines made his name synonymous with the test for determining whether a machine had achieved consciousness or not. After Turing, both the British and the Americans continued work on integrating thinking machines into warfare. The U.S. Navy created a landmark system in 1958 called the Perceptron that was intended to learn tasks like a human. The New York Times reported that Perceptron was expected to learn to "walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence," in short order. As with most of the history of AI, the hype proved overly optimistic. Perceptron and other systems failed to deliver thinking machines in the 1950s and 1960s, sending the field of AI into its first "winter." |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Bobby 2025-12-31 08:55 |