CAMBRIA COUNTY, Pa. (WJAC) — What will happen when artificial intelligence is integrated into American military operations?
Do humans still have the upper hand on the battlefield?
Our Valorie Myers takes us inside the facilities of some of the region’s most prominent defense vendors and manufacturers, revealing the developments taking place and the new military landscape emerging.
The robot dogs look futuristic, but they’re being trained and deployed right here in western Pennsylvania. And that’s just one of many military advances using artificial intelligence in our region.
“The military is armed with weapons so if there’s a hostage situation or you just need to take out the bad guys, they don’t put humans at risk,” explained Christopher Watkins, president of Watkins Security LLC.
And that’s the goal of these devices: to put machines in mission-critical situations to minimize human harm.
We spoke with multiple vendors from defense contractors and defense manufacturers in our region to uncover the truth about how both autonomous and human-controlled AI are currently being deployed in the U.S. military, the solutions AI provides, and the associated ethical implications.
“We have been developing AI for our clients for decades, and one of the areas that is very important to us today is adversarial AI, which means almost ensuring that an adversary cannot trick or trick our AI algorithms. We are building defenses against that,” said Kevin Pudliner, vice president of Digital Mission Solutions at CTC.
The enterprise-wide defenses we spoke to include continued testing of algorithms and ongoing research to ensure all safeguards are effective in identifying threats, even if they are disguised.
As we learned, autonomous AI, or AI that is self-contained and independent, is being actively deployed in the military.
“It’s saving lives because with drone technology, everything is autonomous and is proceeding autonomously. Things like collisions are happening because of drone technology,” Watkins added.
The robot dog we showed can also operate autonomously and react on its own to anyone’s movements.
And on the defensive side of cybersecurity, other types of autonomous AI are at work.
“From a cybersecurity perspective, we have adversaries that put malware and Trojans on various systems, and our systems need to be able to detect that and respond in real time,” Padreiner explained.
However, all the companies we spoke to agree that there is still a need for humans to be involved in communicating information.
“AI is not a fixed solution. It enhances and enhances the human capabilities we are still paying for,” said Darin Mousey, vice president of operations at Mission Critical Solutions.
“We’re basically saying we’re going to treat it like an intern. We’re not just going to trust what’s written there, because there are certain inputs that are going to give us certain biases. No matter what level you’re using it, you have to have human-level safeguards,” adds Will Polacek, president of JWF Industries.
But in the future, the role of humans may become even more limited.
“Right now, I think human interaction is necessary as a precaution, but it will soon become fully autonomous,” Watkins said.
We also spoke to Cambria County Commissioner Keith Rager, a Marine Corps veteran, to find out what older generations of warfighters think about the autonomous robotic elements increasingly used in combat.
“It’s just amazing to have a drone come in and take a wounded soldier out of the firing zone and bring him back to the rear for treatment. But robots, all these things are supportive, but at the end of the day, it’s mano to mano, one man to the other, and the best one wins.”
But how much can we trust AI in wartime? Can we trust it with sensitive military data?
“From an ethical perspective, customer information is proprietary, and we want to make sure that no data is used for the wrong reasons,” Mousey says.
“As a country, we take this issue seriously and intend to do things the right way, but we certainly can’t rely on that against an adversary,” added David Pursch, CTC’s chief data and information officer.
“It’s like a gun, you know what I mean? If a gun is used to protect yourself, but if that gun falls into the wrong hands, it’s the same with AI,” Watkins said.
Later this week, we’ll explore the future of AI in defense, what could be at stake, and how local manufacturers and vendors are adapting their products and hiring processes to an accelerating AI environment.
