Tag Archives: A.I. artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence in Warfare

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping every domain it touches—from commerce and communication to medicine and education. But perhaps no transformation is as consequential or as controversial as its application in modern warfare. AI is revolutionizing how wars are fought, who fights them, and what it means to wield power in the 21st century.

In Genius Weapons (Prometheus, 2018), I explored the trajectory of intelligent weapons systems, tracing how developments in machine learning, robotics, and sensor technologies were converging to create systems that could not only assist but potentially replace human decision-makers in the fog of war. Today, the core themes of that book have become more urgent than ever.

From Decision Support to Autonomous Lethality

AI systems in the military began as decision-support tools—systems designed to analyze vast datasets, identify threats, or optimize logistics. Today, we see a dramatic escalation in their roles. Armed drones now operate with increasing autonomy, capable of identifying and engaging targets without direct human input. Surveillance platforms process terabytes of data in real-time using AI, flagging potential threats faster than any analyst could.

Perhaps the most transformative development is the emergence of autonomous weapons systems—machines that can select and engage targets on their own. As I outlined in Genius Weapons, these systems represent a paradigm shift, not only in capability but in accountability. When a machine makes the decision to kill, who is responsible? The programmer? The commander? The algorithm?

Geopolitical Implications and the AI Arms Race

Nations around the world are investing significant resources in military AI. The United States, China, Russia, and Israel are leading the charge, each with different doctrines and levels of transparency. China’s People’s Liberation Army, for instance, has explicitly described  “intelligentized warfare”—a term used in Chinese military doctrine to describe the integration of AI and advanced technologies into all aspects of warfare. They view it as the future of military power, investing in AI for command decision-making, autonomous drones, and cyber operations.

This arms race has created what analysts call an “AI Cold War,” where nations are not just building weapons, but reshaping the entire military ecosystem—intelligence, command and control, logistics, and cyber operations—with AI at its core. The dangers of this race are not hypothetical. As I warned in Genius Weapons, when multiple actors rush to deploy systems whose full capabilities and limitations are not yet understood, the risk of unintended escalation grows exponentially.

The Ethics of Killing Without Conscience

Perhaps the most profound concern is ethical. Rules of engagement and international law bind human soldiers, and, crucially, they are expected to apply judgment and moral reasoning in combat. Machines do not possess empathy, remorse, or conscience. Can we entrust machines with decisions that involve life and death?

There is a growing international movement to ban or strictly regulate lethal autonomous weapons, spearheaded by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and supported by a range of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), ethicists, and United Nations (UN) bodies. However, as I argued in Genius Weapons, the genie is already out of the bottle. The challenge now is not how to stop these technologies, but how to govern them through transparency, human oversight, and international norms.

Conclusion: The Need for Intelligent Policy

AI in warfare is neither inherently evil nor inherently good—it is a tool. But unlike conventional weapons, it introduces radical new dynamics: speed, scale, unpredictability, and the potential for machines to act beyond human control. The real challenge lies in ensuring that this powerful technology is guided by equally powerful ethics, laws, and human oversight.

As we stand at the edge of a new era in warfare, Genius Weapons remains a call to think critically about how we build, deploy, and restrain the machines we create. The future of war may be intelligent, but whether it will embody humane principles depends entirely on us.

A-life

Should We Consider Strong Artificially Intelligent Machines (SAMs) A New Life-Form?

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What is a strong artificially intelligent machine (SAM)? It is a machine whose intelligence equals that of a human being. Although no SAM currently exists, many artificial intelligence researchers project SAMs will exist by the mid-21st Century. This has major implications and raises an important question, Should we consider SAMs a new life-form? Numerous philosophers and AI researchers have addressed this question. Indeed, the concept of artificial life dates back to ancient myths and stories. The best known of these is Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, published in 1823. In 1986, American computer scientist Christopher Langton, however, formally established the scientific discipline that studies artificial life (i.e., A-life).

No current definition of life considers any A-life simulations to be alive in the traditional sense (i.e., constituting a part of the evolutionary process of any ecosystem). That view of life, however, is beginning to change as artificial intelligence comes closer to emulating a human brain. For example, Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann (1903–1957) asserted, “life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium.” In effect, this suggests that strong AI represents a new life-form, namely A-life.

In the early 1990s, ecologist Thomas S. Ray asserted that his Tierra project, a computer simulation of artificial life, did not simulate life in a computer, but synthesized it. This begs the following question, “How do we define A-life?”

The earliest description of A-life that comes close to a definition emerged from an official conference announcement in 1987 by Christopher Langton, published subsequently in the 1989 book Artificial Life: The Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems:

Artificial life is the study of artificial systems that exhibit behavior characteristics of natural living systems. It is the quest to explain life in any of its possible manifestations, without restriction to the particular examples that have evolved on Earth. This includes biological and chemical experiments, computer simulations, and purely theoretical endeavors. Processes occurring on molecular, social, and evolutionary scales are subject to investigation. The ultimate goal is to extract the logical form of living systems.

There is little doubt that both philosophers and scientists lean toward recognizing A-life as a new life-form. For example, noted philosopher and science fiction writer Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917–2008) wrote in his book 2010: Odyssey Two, “Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.” Noted cosmologist and physicist Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) darkly speculated during a speech at the Macworld Expo in Boston, “I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image” (Daily News, [August 4, 1994]). The main point is that we are likely to consider strong AI a new form of life.

After reading this post, What do you think?