AI, AUTONOMY, AND THE RISK OF NUCLEAR WAR

At the 29 July of 2022 JAMES JOHNSON has put  on the  War on the Rocks the next post about AI, autonomy and the risk of nuclear war. Lets listen the first part of his opinion:

Will emerging technologies like AI increase the risk of nuclear war? We are in an era of rapid disruptive technological change, especially in AI. Therefore, the nascent journey to reorient military forces to prepare for the future digitized battlefield is no longer merely speculation or science fiction. “AI technology” is already fused into military machines, and global armed forces are well advanced in their planning, research and development, and, in many cases, deployment of AI-enabled capabilities.

AI does not exist in a vacuum. In isolation, AI is unlikely to be a strategic game changer. Instead, it will likely reinforce the destabilizing effects of advanced weaponry, thereby increasing the speed of war and compressing the decision-making timeframe. The inherently destabilizing effects of military AI may exacerbate tension between nuclear-armed powers, especially China and the United States, but not for the reasons you may think.

How and to what degree does AI augmentation mark a departure from automation in the nuclear enterprise, which goes back several decades? How transformative are these developments? And what are the potential risks posed by fusing AI technology with nuclear weapons? While we can’t answer these questions fully, only by extrapolating present trends in AI-enabling capabilities can we illuminate the potential risks of the current trajectory and thus consider ways to manage them.

James Johnson is a lecturer in strategic studies at the University of Aberdeen. He is also an honorary fellow at the University of Leicester, a non-resident associate on the European Research Council-funded Towards a Third Nuclear Age Project, and a mid-career cadre with the Center for Strategic Studies Project on Nuclear Issues. He is the author of Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare: USA, China & Strategic Stability. His latest book project with Oxford University Press is AI & the Bomb: Nuclear Strategy and Risk in the Digital Age.