The Future Of The Military Industry

Currently, at least 20 car companies are desperately working towards and coming very close already to a fully self-driving car. Most people don’t realize that all but 3 minutes on average of most commercial flights are done by robots, not the human pilot. Advances in artificial intelligence also seem to follow Moore’s Law. Not long ago, “experts” were claiming that a computer would never be able to beat the human world chess champion. After that defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, those experts then claimed that computers would never be able to do “natural language”, then IBM’s Watson beat the world’s champions in a televised natural language game. And, although computers currently seem to be very smart on relatively small areas, enough expertise in enough areas will start to be combined in single systems, removing more and more humans from their particular jobs.

For the first time in human history, the brain instead of the muscle is being replaced by machines. Within the next few decades, the U.S. war fighter will start to find himself in the same situation that scores of cashiers, telephone operators, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers have been facing in the past couple of decades, whereby computers, robots, and overall automation driven by cheap and easy to upgrade software have taken most of their jobs. If the best war is one where none of our soldiers die or get hurt, it is blatantly obvious to see how an army of autonomous robots, able to make quick decisions without the cloudy emotional trauma of the battlefield, is an inevitable goal.

The military of today is already armed with drones, basic robots, and lots of augmented sensors ready to fight 20th-century battles where the enemy is a state actor. Unfortunately, 90 percent of today’s conflicts are civil wars where robotics will generally fall short and where human factors will continue to be required. Technologies such as data mining, big data processing, and AI generated knowledge will continue to grow, especially in the areas of predicting human behavior. This will allow the military to “disrupt, degrade, and defeat” conflicts that, for the most part and until now, have been unwinnable. On the other hand, these same advances in technology allow both state and non-state enemies to inflict a lot more damage to our side at a very low cost. This makes 21st war fighting much more complex than ever before, whereby a relatively minor enemy might be able to kill or hurt many through the use of malware and “hacking” (i.e. causing a meltdown at a nuclear power plant) from across the world simply using a cheap old laptop.

Still, the biggest risk with the delegation of our thinking (automation) is the military (and by extension the military industry) believing they understand artificial intelligence enough to delegate the killing of enemies (i.e. people) to machines. The Army admits that “our exclusive use of previous paradigms is insufficient for the tasks ahead” suggesting that we must take extremely innovating approaches to the 21st-century enemy. Yet, we have to be extremely careful because at the rate technology is advancing, “without wisdom or prudence, our servant [the robot] may prove to be our executioner” as expressed recently by U.S. Army General Omar Bradley. Humanity’s doom might lie in our inventions eventually getting out of our control.