Technological change is relentless. Fifth generation warfare is only just emerging but already commercial technology developments are pushing us in new directions. Artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived as a new disruptive force although its impact and its usefulness to warfighting is unclear. To help address that question, I recently wrote a paper for the Royal Australian Air Force.
Importantly, this paper tries to stay practically focused on the application of emerging intelligent machine technologies to warfighting. Fictional books and movies remain fascinated by notions of robot soldiers, often fighting some final battle against the human race. Such technologies though remain distant and the form in which they may emerge – if at all – is very uncertain. With warfighting being a practical profession, this paper accordingly sticks to more mundane non-fiction matters in thinking about the here-and-now.
However, while Terminator cyborgs and Cyberdyne’s Skynet are imaginary, today’s smart-phone and internet search engines already use intelligent machine technologies. The Chinese Government’s Skynet intelligent surveillance system is operational and Project Maven will deliver its AI-powered analysis system to the USAF later this year. Intelligent machines have arrived. Algorithmic warfare is very real.
The paper’s ‘Algorithmic Warfare’ title derives from Project Maven but it is much broader than that project or indeed AI itself. When we use AI, we are generally actually thinking of an amalgam of various technologies including ‘big data’ and ‘the cloud’ that when integrated give us machines with particular capabilities. These technologies are emerging from the commercial world and proliferating widely, as the AI in your smart phone will tell you if asked. Given this, the key differentiator in determining combat performance between future intelligent machines used for warfighting tasks appears likely to be the algorithms each incorporates and how it has been trained.
Please click here to read the full “Duelling algorithms: Using artificial intelligence in warfighting” article published in Over the Horizon, written by Griffith Asia Institute Visiting Fellow, Dr Peter Layton.
