Thread by @skepticaliblog

The Pentagon’s budget for 2020 has lavished almost $1bn on AI and over four times as much on unmanned and autonomous capabilities that rely on it.

A similar flurry of activity is under way in China and in Russia.
economist.com/science-and-te…

The paradox is that AI might at once penetrate and thicken the fog of war, allowing it to be waged with a speed and complexity that renders it essentially opaque to humans.

DARPA conducted tests of a drone swarm capable of collaborating even when cut off from human contact

There is now more raw data than ever before—in 2011 alone, America’s 11,000-or-so drones sent back over 37 years of footage

The second major application for AI in the armed forces will be in processing data—algorithms surpassed human performance in image classification by 2015

In 2012 leaked documents from the NSA, America’s signals-intelligence agency, described a program (reassuringly called Skynet), which applied machine learning to Pakistani mobile-phone data in order to pick out individuals who might be couriers for terrorist groups.

“It seems likely humans will be increasingly both out of the loop and off the team in decision-making from tactical to strategic”

Combat will speed up “beyond the capabilities of human cognition”

The result would not only be autonomous weapons, but an automated battlefield