Last week, the United States received a warning from its own U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen, VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, (ISR,) for the Air Staff at the Pentagon, that China is pulling ahead in artificial intelligence research.
She forewarned that China may have more substantial, auspicious and nefarious plans, than any other adversary for actually using A.I. to control its population, enhance its military power, and conduct espionage against other nations.
Speaking at an Air Force Association breakfast last week, Lt. General Jamieson said that in 2017, China spent an estimated $12 billion on artificial intelligence alone. Unfortunately, the U.S. is well behind with $7.4 billion on all emerging technologies combined.
Military.com Reported:
"Speed is of the essence in the digital age," said Lt. Gen. VeraLinn "Dash" Jamieson.
She painted a grim picture: While "great instigator" Russia has the desire to do ambitious experiments with A.I., China already has the means.
For example, China is building several digital artificial intelligence cities in a military-civilian partnership to understand how A.I. will be propagated as it strives to become the global leader in technology. The cities track human movement through artificial facial recognition software, watching citizens' every move as they go about their day.”
The Chinese are also working on using A.I. to process battlefield intelligence faster than humans. This means attacking and reacting faster than any fighting force in human history.
Perhaps, humanity is biting off more than we can chew. Do we really know where this could lead us? (There are a few movies that come to mind.)
Reported by SIGNAL Magazine, the official publication of AFCEA
“Technology called hyperwar, is being developed, which would combine human soldiers with the processing of artificial intelligence-based algorithms to make decisions.
Hyperwar can take the form of enhancements to existing systems as well as revolutionary approaches to conflict. “The concept behind hyperwar is to consider what happens when AI fuses with the needs of war,“ offered Amir Husain, founder and CEO, Spark Cognition Inc. “The advent of hyperwar opens up the reinterpretation of our geostrategic future.”’
China has claimed it already has rudimentary hyperwar assets, such as bombers that can be flown by A.I. They have stated that they want to achieve A.I. dominance by 2030.
The recent remarks, from Lt. Gen. Jamieson’s stressed the importance of human decision making in A.I. development and that human decision-makers aren’t over-whelmed by the machine’s high speed system of processing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data (ISR). In of which could propose an possible danger of conflicts spiraling out of control as human decision-makers prove unable to keep up.
Breitbart Reports:
“Industry and airmen will be asked to increase the quality and quantity of ISR production while remaining competent across the range of military operations. We are going to do this as a team,” Lt. Gen. Jamieson promised.
“Data is a weapon,” she said. “All of us need to treat data in this light.”
The Pentagon’s goal is to “make warfighting decisions at the speed of relevance.”’
Right now, our military lacks the capabilities to have some software instantly upgraded at an adequate scale and speed. There are incompatibility issues, between various computer systems, a shortage of knowledgeable buyers within the military bureaucracy and inefficient procurement practices as well. The slow speed of military acquisitions, must improve by four or five times to catch up with China.
According to Lt. Gen. Jamison, and analysts, it is essential that all of these issues be solved in order to keep up, and win the A.I race with our adversaries.
There is a $10 billion plan in the works to develop a highly secure data cloud for the military, amusingly know as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or “JEDI” for short.
There are 500 different clouds that are managed by The Defense Department, plus countless non-networked storage systems on-premises. JEDI would simplify, and make the process more efficient.
Thus far, getting the JEDI project underway has been the kind of sluggish, ambiguous, burdensome, politicized acquisition process that is a perfect example to why, Lt. Gen. Jamieson finds the United States’ efforts in A.I. development inadequate in the race for A.I. superiority.
Jamieson also pointed out that using only one unified cloud system could be more easily targeted by hackers.
The theory that America’s unparalleled Big Tech corporations would be helpful to the U.S. military in surpassing China and Russia on A.I. development has many political flaws. Some have uneasy public relationships with President Donald J. Trump, while others are not comfortable with doing work for the military or intelligence communities.
Sadly, the optics might be a detraction to their customer base, because unfortunately some do not know how to put differences aside and do what’s best for the good of the country and “We the People.”
Also from Breitbart:
“A group of artificial intelligence researchers pledged in July never to work on lethal autonomous weapons, saying A.I. killing machines are “as disgusting and destabilizing as bioweapons and should be dealt with in the same way.” Three of the signatories to this pledge were the co-founders of Google’s top A.I. project, DeepMind.”
Surly China and Russia will have no reservations about the morality in developing the most deadly autonomous weapons imaginable and connecting them to A.I. controlled combat networks.
Make no mistake, they will not hesitate to steal peacefully designed Western researcher’s technology and use it against us. Which could have devastating consequences for the United States if we can not defend ourselves from more sophisticated attacks than we ourselves are capable, or that we can detect in advance. A.I. warfare could someday be a more devastating first strike from our enemy than a nuclear missile. America needs to pull ahead or at least keep up, because this is an arms race that she can’t afford to lose.
Sources:
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2018/08/01/top-u-s-general-warns-china-pulling-ahead-on-artificial-intelligence-research/
https://www.military.com/defensetech/2018/07/30/china-leaving-us-behind-artificial-intelligence-air-force-general.html
https://www.afcea.org/content/hyperwar-coming-faster-you-think
https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2017/08/07/emerging-hyperwar-signals-ai-fueled-machine-waged-future-of-conflict/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/01/pentagon_jedi_cloud_vendor_bids_delayed/
https://www.afcea.org/content/dod-pursues-joint-enterprise-defense-infrastructure
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/pentagon-hopes-jedi-contract-good-for-the-force/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brittainladd/2018/07/29/amazon-is-not-a-monopoly-president-trump-yet/#62f066ee4735
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html
https://futurism.com/lethal-autonomous-weapons-pledge/