“The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire.” Skulls crushed under robot tank treads. Laser flashes from floating shadowy crafts. Small human figures scurrying to escape.
These iconic images open The Terminator, the movie that perhaps like no other coalesced the sci-fi fears of the 1980s into a single (rather good) movie set in 2029, in Los Angeles, in the wake of nuclear war.
As we rush headlong into the AI future, with arms races renewed once again, and too little thought being given to safety concerns, are we headed for something like Hollywood’s hellscape where machines have killed or subjugated almost the entire human race?
Well, yes, it’s happening now. Russia and Ukraine have been exchanging drone attacks for two years, with an increasing number of these drones being autonomous. Israel has allegedly been using AI targeting programs for thousands of infrastructure and human targets in Gaza, in many cases with little to no human supervision.
Closer to home, the U.S. Department of Defense has been loud and public about its plans to incorporate AI into many aspects of its weapons systems. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said while unveiling a new AI strategy at the Pentagon in late 2023: “As we’ve focused on integrating AI into our operations responsibly and at speed, our main reason for doing so has been straightforward: because it improves our decision advantage.”
The trend toward incorporating AI into weapons systems is mostly due to its speed in integrating information to reach decisions; AI is already thousands of times faster than humans in many tasks, and will soon be millions, then billions of times faster. This “accelerating decision advantage” logic, the subtitle of the new AI strategy document, can apply across all kinds of weapons systems, including nuclear weapons.
Experts have warned about such incorporating of advanced AI systems into surveillance and weapons launch systems, including in a December book by James Johnson, AI and the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age, which argues that we are on track for a world where AI is incorporated into nuclear weapons systems, the most dangerous weapons ever developed. Former senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, a long-respected voice in defense policy, and many others have also warned about the potential catastrophe(s) that could occur if AI is used this way.
To read more, click here.