The dystopian future of AI warfare
From the electronic battlefields of Vietnam to the network-centric warfare developed in the late 1990s and used in Iraq and Afghanistan, every new generation and every new war promises the emergence of new kinds of technology that will forever change the nature of warfare.
Most of the time, these technologies fail.
Today, the arms industry is selling the Replicator Initiative to the American public as a way for Washington to gain a military advantage over China.
“Replicator starts with full-domain, 'expendable' autonomy to overcome China's quantitative advantages of more ships, more missiles and more troops,” it said. pentagonDeputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said these capabilities “will enable a determined defender to deny larger aggressors their objectives, enable them to sustain attacks with fewer troops, and can be manufactured, deployed and upgraded at the speed warfighters need without the need for lengthy maintenance windows.”
If history is any guide, there is every reason to believe that these proposed technological advances will fail, or may even end up doing worse.
“If you look at how AI has been used so far, it bodes very badly,” said William Hartung, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible National Strategy. New Videos Produced by Khody Akhavi and Steve McMaster. “They'll sell us a lie. It'll all fail. We'll waste a lot of money and create a lot of tension. Or they'll integrate it into the war machine, with disastrous consequences. It's time to worry about that.”
