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ABSTRACT
We argue that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will, in the very near future, have a profound impact on the conduct of strategy and will be disruptive of existing power balances. To do so, we review the psychological foundations of strategy and explore the ways in which AI will impact human decision-making. We then review current and evolving capabilities in ‘narrow’, modular AI that is optimised to perform in a particular environment, and explore its military potential. Lastly, we look ahead to the more distant prospect of a general AI.
Notes
1 Samuel Gibbs, ‘Elon Musk: Artificial Intelligence is our biggest existential threat’, The Guardian, 27 Oct 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggestexistential-threat>; Rory Cellan-Jones, ‘Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind,’ BBC News, 2 December 2014 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30290540>.
2 Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (New York: Basic Books 2015).
3 Hew Strachan, ‘The Lost Meaning of Strategy’, Survival 47/3 (Autumn 2005) 33–54.
4 Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press Citation2013).
5 Kenneth Payne, The Psychology of Strategy: Exploring Strategy in the Vietnam War (London: Hurst & Co. 2015).
6 Carl von Clausewitz, On War (London: David Campbell Citation1993) 97.
7 On Clausewitz’s analogy, in January 2015, Cepheus, an AI from University of Alberta ‘solved’ heads up limit Texas hold ‘em poker; a two player game in an environment of ‘imperfect’ information. See Michael Bowling et al., ‘Heads-up limit hold’em poker is solved’, Science 347/6218 (January 2015) 145–9. In a less bounded version of hold ‘em poker, however, the best human players can still prevail.
8 Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (London: Penguin 2012).
9 Liat Clark, ‘Google’s artificial brain learns to find cat videos’, Wired UK, 26 June 2012 <http://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/>.
10 See Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006) and Robin Dunbar, Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction (London: Penguin 2014).
11 Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press 1996).
12 Kenneth Payne, ‘Fighting On: Emotion and Conflict Termination’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 28/3 (August 2015) 480–97.
13 Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1996).
14 Donald Rumsfeld, ‘Department of Defense News Briefing’, 12 Feb 2002 <http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636>.
15 Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias (London: Robinson 2012).
16 Daniel P. Kahneman, Paul Slovic, et al., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982).
17 Daniel P. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allen Lane Citation2011).
18 Paul Slovic et al., ‘The Affect Heuristic’, European Journal of Operational Research 177/3 (March 2007) 1333–52.
19 Elizabeth Loftus, ‘Planting Misinformation in the Human Mind: A 30-Year Investigation of the Malleability of Memory’, Learning & Memory 12/4 (July–August 2005) 361–6.
20 James N. Druckman and Rose McDermott, ‘Emotion and the Framing of Risky Choice’, Political Behavior 30/3 (February 2008) 297–321.
21 Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston, CA: Houghton Mifflin 1982).
22 John C. Turner, et al., Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-categorization Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1987).
23 See David Szondy, ‘US Navy demonstrates how robotic “swarm” boats could protect warships’, Gizmag, 6 October 2014 <http://www.gizmag.com/onr-swarm-boats/34124/>.
24 Stephen P. Rosen, War and Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005); Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering our Greatest Strength (London: Allen Lane 2012).
25 Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Times Books 1995).
26 Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (London: Allen Lane 2007).
27 Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005).
28 Michael Hickins, ‘How the NSA could get smart so fast’, The Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2013 <http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324049504578541271020665666>.
29 Stephen Baker, Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011).
30 See John McCarthy et al., ‘A proposal for the Dartmouth summer research project on artificial intelligence’ , AI Magazine 27/4, 31 Aug. 1955, p. 12.
31 Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (San Francisco, CA: W.H. Freeman 1979).
32 DARPA, ‘Request for Information (RFI) on Research and Development of a Cortical Processor’, DARPA-SN-13-46, 14 August 2013 <https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=91bc9e58d6fa024d55d7c0583d38fc21&tab=core&_cview=0>
33 Andrew Y. Ng et al., ‘Autonomous Inverted Helicopter Flight Via Reinforcement Learning’, Experimental Robotics IX: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics 21 (March 2006) 363–72.
34 For a video, see stanfordhelicopter, ‘Stanford Autonomous Helicopter – Airshow #1’, YouTube, 21 July 2008 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JL04JJjocc>.
35 Volodymyr Mnih et al., ‘Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning’, Nature 518/7540 (February 2015) 529–33.
36 Jason Scholz et al., ‘Machine learning for adversarial agent microworlds’, MODSIM 2005 International Congress on Modeling and Simulation, Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, (December 2005) 2195–201.
37 Yingjie Li et al., ‘RTS Game Strategy Evaluation Using Extreme Learning Machine’, Soft Computing 16/9 (February 2012) 1627–37.
38 Jorge Galindo and Pablo Tamayo, ‘Credit Risk Assessment Using Statistical And Machine Learning: Basic Methodology And Risk Modeling Applications’, Computational Economics 15/1–2 (April 2000) 107–43; Jochen Kruppa et al., ‘Risk Estimation And Risk Prediction Using Machine-Learning Methods’, Human Genetics 131/10 (October 2012) 1639–54.
39 Yanping Chen et al., ‘Flying Insect Classification with Inexpensive Sensors’, Journal of Insect Behavior 27/5 (June 2014) 657–77.
40 See NASA Ames Research Center, ‘NASA “Evolutionary” software automatically designs antenna’, NASA RELEASE: 04-55AR, 14 June 2006 <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/st-5/main/04-55AR.html>.
41 John R. Auten, and Robert J. Hammell, ‘Predicting the Perforation Capability of Kinetic Energy Projectiles using Artificial Neural Networks’, 2014 IEEE symposium on Computational Intelligence for Engineering Solutions (CIES), Orlando, FL, Dec. 2014, 132–9.
42 Patrick Tucker, ‘The Marines Are Building Robotic War Balls’, Defense One, 12 February 2015 <http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/02/marines-are-building-robotic-war-balls/105258/?oref=search_marines%20war%20balls>.
43 Peter Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century (London: Penguin 2009) 124–5.
44 William C. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1976).
45 Clausewitz, On War, and see especially Peter Paret, The Cognitive Challenge of War: Prussia 1806 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2009).
46 George C. Herring and United States Department of Defense, The Pentagon Papers (New York: McGraw-Hill 1993).
47 Ben Connable, Embracing the Fog of War: Assessment and Metrics in Counterinsurgency (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation 2012).
48 See <https://github.com/>, <http://www.clarifai.com/>, <http://h2o.ai/>.
50 See Tom Simonite, ‘Thinking in Silicon’, MIT Technology Review, February 2014 <http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/522476/thinking-in-silicon/>.
51 See <www.kaggle.com>.
52 Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003); Michael Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009).
53 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press 1982).
54 Noah J. Goodall, ‘Ethical Decision Making during Automated Vehicle Crashes’, Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board 2424 (2014) 58–65.
55 Clausewitz, On War, 84–7.
56 Jonathan R. Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998).
57 Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2012).
58 Nick Bostrom, ‘Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence’, in Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons 2009) 277–86.
59 Peter Norvig, ‘Ask not can machines think, ask how machines fit into the mechanisms we design’, Edge.org Annual Question <http://edge.org/response-detail/26055>.
60 Dan Lamothe, ‘New competition launched in development of US military’s “Iron Man” suit’, The Washington Post, 27 October 2014 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/10/27/new-competition-starts-in-development-of-u-s-militarys-iron-man-suit/>.
61 Gopal Santhanam et al., ‘A High-Performance Brain–Computer Interface’, Nature 442/7099 (July 2006) 195–8; Jonathan R. Wolpaw, ‘Brain–Computer Interfaces’, Handbook of Clinical Neurology 110 (2013) 67–74.
62 See <www.magicleap.com>.
63 Darren Pauli, ‘DARPA’s cortical modem will plug straight into your brain’, The Register, 17 February 2015 <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/17/darpas_google_glass_will_plug_straight_into_your_brain/>.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kareem Ayoub
Kareem Ayoub is a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford where he is an MD/PhD candidate and researcher in artificial intelligence. His published research spans the use of AI to understand traumatic brain injury, healthy motor control and stroke. He has consulted for various organisations on the use of AI in technical innovation, including the UK Department of Health, the UK Government Office for Science, Nesta and Clear Health Analytics.
Kenneth Payne
Kenneth Payne is a lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, and a research associate of the Centre of International Studies at the University of Oxford. A political psychologist, he is the author of two books on strategy: The Psychology of Strategy: Exploring Rationality in the Vietnam War (London: Hurst &Co 2015) (New York: Oxford University Press 2015) and The Psychology of Modern Conflict: Evolutionary Theory, Human Nature and a Liberal Approach to War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).