The world is big, the world is the consultant. At the Bund Finance Summit, 100-year-old Kissinger offered a piece of advice: beware of artificial intelligence becoming a tool of war. Are you also interested in seeing this message? We all want to know how exactly AI will affect the future of warfare and international order? However, in Kissinger's account, we don't seem to hear anything. People are masters of strategy, and they all speak big, simple and philosophical words, which are frankly difficult for ordinary people to understand. Let's explore a rough idea based on specific cases.
Kissinger said to be wary of artificial intelligence becoming a tool of war, and he said that this vigilance is not actually avoided, because the application of artificial intelligence technology to war and military development is already underway. Kissinger's vigilance should be for governments, especially major powers, to pay full attention to this reality, strengthen mutual cooperation, and set rules for robots to obey human commands, rather than go beyond human control and do destructive things beyond our expectations.
So, how exactly will AI be applied on the battlefield? Some military bloggers took the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as examples. In the course of Israel's fight against Palestinian "Hamas" forces, the Israeli army killed many Hamas commanders in a short period of time. In the current Russian-Ukrainian battlefield, the Ukrainian army, with the help of Western countries, has also implemented the same tactics, causing heavy casualties to important battlefield commanders of the Russian army through targeted elimination. This high-tech means is said to be a "face recognition system" powered by Western technology, once the commander or important person of the enemy army is locked, his face information will be transmitted to drones and satellites and other devices, and then automatically guide precision guided munitions to launch precision strikes on target objects.
The reason why Ukraine can be small and broad is inseparable from the battlefield intelligence and artificial intelligence system provided by the US military, and the artificial intelligence big data system can calculate the actions of the Russian army through algorithms. Every UAV sortie and every launch of a supersonic cruise missile is essentially a PK of chip manufacturing, electronic operating systems, computer supercomputing, satellite navigation, radar tracking, optical sensing, software integration and other technologies. Modern warfare, at least from the perspective of the United States, the West and Ukraine, has long entered the era of intelligence, and the face database provided by the American face recognition company Clearview AI can identify Russian agents and confirm the identity of the dead through pictures and search engines collected on Russian social platforms. Artificial intelligence tools developed by Primer, an American artificial intelligence company, are being used to eavesdrop on Russian soldiers' communications on the battlefield, automatically scraping, transcribing, translating and analyzing Russian military unencrypted conversations.
Under the pressure of public opinion, Elon Musk's Starlink service has also been launched in Ukraine, which is the most powerful and perfect set of space military system of the US military, which can build global beam coverage without blind spots, achieve near-all-weather uninterrupted reconnaissance and surveillance, and use big data analysis of the computing system to identify targets, which is equivalent to building a "transparent" battlefield. And the weak side in artificial intelligence technology and space technology is almost "running naked" on the battlefield. In addition, Russia and the United States and the West also show obvious asymmetry in cyber warfare, public opinion war, trade war, financial war and other aspects.
These are the application of artificial intelligence technology on the battlefield, intelligent combat command system can make quick decisions and adjust combat strategies according to real-time intelligence and battlefield changes, improve combat effectiveness and reaction speed, and can also predict the enemy's intentions and actions through data analysis and simulation, and formulate the optimal combat plan. Of course, it is only the initial stage or the weak intelligence stage. It has not yet evolved into the kind of robot directly charged by the science fiction movie depicted, nor has it gone beyond the human command category. What Kissinger and people of insight are most worried about is that in the future, when artificial intelligence no longer obeys human commands, under the lack of human morality and rationality, it will only make irreversible decisions based on mechanized thinking, such as instinctively choosing to use nuclear weapons or use them by terrorists. The consequences are creepy.
Kissinger said: There are many machines around us, and we don't know what they really think. While nuclear weapons are devastating, fortunately they do not activate themselves based on a perception of danger, AI is hard to say. How to set rules for the machine? The two tech powers should have an urgent dialogue on how to set ethical and code of conduct. Because philosophically and intellectually, from all aspects, human society is not prepared for the rise of artificial intelligence.