As Frank Kendall, the U.S. secretary of the Air Force, opined, “These machines will eventually need to have the power to take lethal action on their own while remaining under human oversight in how they are deployed. “
This fascinating quotation about the military potential of A.I. is deeply revealing of how an obsolete way of thinking works. The statement allows a direct stare into the heart of evil, not the evil of malign intent, but of the blind futility of violence accelerated by technological “progress.” It foretells a perverse refusal of possibilities other than dehumanizing our adversaries so completely that we are willing to kill them with machines that are already frighteningly lethal, even without the capacity to make their own decisions.
Also implicit in the secretary’s old thinking is that sacred cow of establishment thinking, deterrence. As long as we have more of the latest, fastest, most intelligent and most destructive weapons, we will not need to use them because that will be sufficient to make our enemy think twice before taking us on. But contemporary asymmetric warfare, let alone the likelihood of either human or A.I. error, effectively undermines deterrence theory.
Conventional war doesn’t resolve the underlying conflict that initiated it. Nuclear war even less so (think nuclear winter). Variations on nuclear or chemical or biological war with the added dimension of A.I. will become doubly, triply world-destructive—in other words, obsolete.
Because everyone’s security and survival is a shared problem, we need to re-humanize our adversaries—to perceive the “me-semblance” of the other, even if they seem hateful to us and toward us.
We need our military people on all sides to gather and peer together down the time-stream at a future that holds only two possibilities: Either adversaries spend infinite treasure and resources to arrive at a stalemate on a new, even more hair-trigger level—or we destroy ourselves.
When we agree that these will be the outcomes unless we change, we can work together to apply A.I. to common challenges, including the prevention of wars no one can win.
Winslow Myers is the author of ‘Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.’
