One of the Pentagon’s primary jobs is anticipating what the wars of the future will look like so that it can allocate the resources necessary to make sure the U.S. has the edge in those battles. When people in the defense industry talk about the tools of future war, they usually mention applications of AI, autonomous weaponry, and a very different role for warm-blooded human beings during battle. These technologies are in their early stages of maturity; defense forces don’t yet understand the best ways to deploy them in battle. Military leaders in other wealthy countries, including China and Russia , are also talking about such matters, though we don’t know where they’re placing their bets. For a number of reasons—some old, some new—the U.S. could easily get pulled into a race to develop and use autonomous weapons before it understands how to use them predictably, effectively, and ethically. Cold War 2.o We may enter a period of escalation that recalls the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. “There’s an AI arms race where I’m worried about your development of this technology and you’re worried about my development of this technology, and neither of us communicates that we’re aware of the limitations,” said Chris Meserole, director of research and policy for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
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The U.S. is alarmingly close to an autonomous weapons arms race