Defense, Technology The military is calling in AI for support

Perry World House Director Michael Horowitz is quoted in this piece on military applications of artificial intelligence.

For all our fears about Terminator-style killer robots, the aim of AI in the U.S. military is likely to be on augmenting humans, not replacing them.

Why it matters: AI has been described as the "third revolution" in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear weapons. But every revolution carries risks, and even an AI strategy that focuses on assisting human warfighters will carry enormous operational and ethical challenges...

An even bigger game-changer would be if such armed drones were made fully autonomous, but for the foreseeable future such fears of "slaughterbots" that could be used to kill with impunity appear overstated, says Michael Horowitz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.

• "The overwhelming majority of military investments in AI will not be about lethal autonomous weapons, and indeed none of them may be," says Horowitz.
• A report released last month by Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology found defense research into AI is focused "not on displacing humans but assisting them in ways that adapt to how humans think and process information," said Margarita Konaev, the report's co-author, at an event earlier this week.

Read more in Axios >>