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Esa Origins 7 February 24 — 26, 2017
PROJECT An Origins Project Scientific Workshop
Challenges of Artificial Intelligence:
Envisioning and Addressing Adverse Outcomes
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY
3) WAR & PEACE
Al, Military Systems, and Stability
(Contributions from Eric Horvitz, Elon Musk, Stuart Russell, others)
Military applications have long been a motivator for funding scientific R&D, and for developing and
fielding the latest technical advances for defensive and offensive applications. We can expect to see a
rise in the use of Al advances by both state and non-state actors in both strategic and tactical uses, and
in wartime and peace. Al advances have implications for symmetric and asymmetric military
operations and warfare, including terrorist attacks. Advances in such areas as machine learning,
sensing and sensor fusion, pattern recognition, inference, decision making, and robotics and
cyberphysical systems, will increase capabilities and, in many cases, lower the bar of entry for groups
with scarce resources. Al advances will enable new kinds of surveillance, warfighting, killing, and
disruption and can shift traditional balances of power.
Two areas of concern taken together frame troubling scenarios:
e Competitive pressures pushing militaries to invest in increasingly fast-paced situation assessment
and responses that tend to push out human oversight, and lead to increasing reliance on
autonomous sensing, inference, planning, and action.
e Rise of powerful Al-power planning, messaging, and systems by competitors, adversaries, and
third parties that can prompt war intentionally or inadvertently via sham or false signaling and
news.
The increasing automation, coupled with time-critical sensing and response required to dominate, and
failure to grapple effectively with false signals are each troubling, but taken together appear to bea
troubling mix with potentially grave outcomes on the future of the world.
Concerning scenarios can be painted that involve that start of a large-scale war among adversaries via
inadequate human oversight in a time-pressured response situation after receiving signals or a
sequence of signals about an adversary’s actions or intentions. The signal can be either be well-
intentioned, but an unfortunate false positive or an intentionally generated signal (e.g., statement by
leader or weapons engagement) e.g., designed and injected by a third party to ignite a war. Related
scenarios can occur based in destabilization when an adversary believes that systems on the other side
can be foiled due to Al-powered attacks on military sensing, weapons, coupled with false signaling
aimed at human decision makers.
A US DOD directive of 2012 (3000.09) specifies a goal (for procuring weapon systems) of assuring that
autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems are designed to allow commanders and operators
to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. The directive seeks meaningful
human controls. However, it is unclear how this goal can be met with the increasing stime-critical
pressures for sensing and responses, and competition for with building the most effective weapon
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