Catalyst or Reactive? The Next Global Arms Race

Calling back to the previous blog post, there was an excerpt on the ethics of entrusting military hardware to the calculated confines of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence lack a crucial factor that is ever present in all human beings: the sentience to form judgments based on emotions.

Battles with artificial intelligences are not fought over the span of months or years like most conventional warfare scenarios. AIs will choose the most obvious route to victory, which typically means destroy every facet of the enemy until none are left standing. The deployment of weapons of mass destruction is a given, and the death toll will be unthinkable.

Ever watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier? In the movie, lies a concept called Project Insight: It basically harnesses the power of Big Data by using a person's past behaviour to predict their threat level in the future. It's a fanciful concept, but surprisingly grounded in reality. All the AI has to do is to assess a person based on predefined criteria, with no regards to social statuses and what not, and detain the person if he/she constitutes a threat, with no human intervention whatsoever. This has the effect of creating paranoia among the populace, as people will constantly fear for their lives, and repentant criminals might be wrongfully detained and incarcerated without any due notice and reason.

If humanity values its progress and achievements, there comes a time where we have to step back, and contemplate the validity and necessity of our research and development projects. Is it safe? Will it be beneficial or detrimental in the long run? These are questions to ponder upon before we do something that would cause us great regret and misery, decades, centuries and millenia later. (297words)

Written by Thinesh and Khoo Foo Sheng

References:

Shandrow, K.L.(2015). Entrepreneur. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking Warn That AI Military Robots Could Ignite The Next Global Arms Race. [Online] 27 July 2015. Available from http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248872 [Accessed 7 November 2015]