Adding AI to weapons systems doesn’t have to result in a future of killer robots and unavoidable human destruction; it can actually serve as a catalyst for minimizing casualties, author Kenneth Cukier (The Economist) argues in his thought-provoking DLD26 presentation.
Cukier grounds his argument in history. Military technology has always oscillated between “the sword and the shield”, as he points out: some innovations favor offense, others defense.
He compares today’s moment to World War I, when the Industrial Revolution met the military. AI, he suggests, represents “the Moore’s Law moment of the military”, as chips, connectivity and processors empower news kinds of weapons – from drones and loitering munitions to lethal autonomous weapons systems.
Cukier’s central question is: “Can we encode the laws of war in military equipment?” He walks through the three pillars of international humanitarian law and imagines drones that refuse to enter civilian zones, systems that respond proportionately, and image-recognition that can even accept a surrender.
Watch the video to explore this talk in detail.
