The combination of AI and military technologies is very dangerous, world officials believe and are rushing to take control of the development of neural networks.
Military officials, officials and developers from more than 100 countries met Monday in Vienna, Austria, to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on military technology. Politicians believe that military AI needs to be immediately taken under control, writes Bloomberg.
As autonomous weapons systems rapidly proliferate and are deployed, including on the battlefields of Ukraine and Gaza, AI-equipped drones are helping militaries decide whether or not to hit targets. It is possible that such solutions will very soon be completely transferred to machines.
“This is the Oppenheimer moment of our day,” said Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, referring to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who helped invent the atomic bomb in 1945 and later became an advocate for control of nuclear proliferation.
The spread of global conflict, combined with financial incentives for companies promoting AI, is making it harder to control killer robots, said Jaan Tallin, one of the investors in the Alphabet Inc. platform. DeepMind Technologies.
Governments around the world are looking to partner with companies integrating AI tools into the defense sector. For example, the Pentagon is investing millions of dollars in AI startups. The European Union is paying for services to create an image database that will help assess targets on the battlefield through computer vision. Israel uses an artificial intelligence program called Lavender to identify targets.
“The time of killer robots is now,” said Anthony Aguirre, a physicist who predicted the technology’s trajectory in 2017. “We need an arms control treaty agreed upon by the UN General Assembly.”
But supporters of diplomatic solutions are likely to be disappointed in the short term, according to Alexander Kmentt, Austria’s top disarmament official. He believes that the classical approach to arms control does not work because it is not about one weapon system, but about a combination of dual-use technologies. Rather than negotiate a new magnum opus treaty, Kmentt suggested that countries might be forced to follow through with legal tools already at their disposal. Strengthening export controls and humanitarian laws could help curb the spread of AI systems, he said.
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In the long term, as technology becomes available to non-state actors and possibly terrorists, countries will be forced to create new rules, predicts Arnoldo Andre Tinoco, Costa Rica’s foreign minister. The easy availability of autonomous weapons removes the restrictions that previously kept few people from participating in the arms race, he said. And now anyone with a 3D printer and basic programming knowledge can create drones and use them as weapons of mass destruction. Autonomous weapons systems have forever changed the concept of international stability, the minister emphasized.
We previously wrote that American military AI lags behind Chinese developments. Military officials in charge of technology for the US Army believe that Congress is not allocating enough funds for the development of military AI.
