Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt on the Perils of Military Brinkmanship in the Age of AI
http://www.newsweek.com/2021/11/12/henry-kissinger-eric-schmidt-perils-military-brinkmanship-age-ai-1644516.html
Brandon Laufenberg/Getty; Ihor Svetiukha/GettyIn ways large and small, artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous. Search engines, maps and social media are analyzing our histories to make predictions and tailor relevant responses. Text and email applications, which know the words and phrases we use most often, are trying to complete our sentences. AI programs like AlphaGo and AlphaZero are winning games—in their cases, Go and chess—by playing themselves and, in so doing, developing their own not-quite-human concepts of the games. At MIT, an AI program discovered a new antibiotic by identifying patterns in data that humans did not—or possibly never could. Struck by these and other breakthroughs, the all-star team of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Schmidt Futures co-founder and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Dean Daniel Huttenlocher have come together to analyze AI—how it evolved; where it is now; and where, eventually, it will take us. In this excerpt from their book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future (Little, Brown & Company) they consider the transformations AI will impose on the planning, preparation and conduct of war. They conclude that humans remain essential to the equation.
Throughout history, a nation's political influence has correlated with its military power—in other words, its ability to inflict damage on other societies. But equilibrium based on military power is not static. It relies on consensus—importantly, among all the members of the international system—about what constitutes power; what renders power legitimate and which members have both the capability and the intention to use their power to try to impose their will. When members diverge on the nature of the power that defines their equilibrium, they risk conflict, especially conflict born of miscalculation.