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A new RAND Corporation paper finds that artificial intelligence has the potential to upend the foundations of nuclear deterrence by the year 2040.
While AI-controlled doomsday machines are considered unlikely, the hazards of artificial intelligence for nuclear security lie instead in its potential to encourage humans to take potentially apocalyptic risks, according to the paper.
During the Cold War, the condition of mutual assured destruction maintained an uneasy peace between the superpowers by ensuring that any attack would be met by a devastating retaliation. Mutual assured destruction thereby encouraged strategic stability by reducing the incentives for either country to take actions that might escalate into a nuclear war.
The new RAND publication says that in coming decades, artificial intelligence has the potential to erode the condition of mutual assured destruction and undermine strategic stability. Improved sensor technologies could introduce the possibility that retaliatory forces such as submarine and mobile missiles could be targeted and destroyed. Nations may be tempted to pursue first-strike capabilities as a means of gaining bargaining leverage over their rivals even if they have no intention of carrying out an attack, researchers say. This undermines strategic stability because even if the state possessing these capabilities has no intention of using them, the adversary cannot be sure of that.
"The connection between nuclear war and artificial intelligence is not new, in fact the two have an intertwined history," said Edward Geist, co-author on the paper and associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization. "Much of the early development of AI was done in support of military efforts or with military objectives in mind."
[...] Under fortuitous circumstances, artificial intelligence also could enhance strategic stability by improving accuracy in intelligence collection and analysis, according to the paper. While AI might increase the vulnerability of second-strike forces, improved analytics for monitoring and interpreting adversary actions could reduce miscalculation or misinterpretation that could lead to unintended escalation.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:01PM (15 children)
This is why we haven't detected any alien civilizations. They destroyed themselves in nuclear wars, just like we will pretty soon as shown in this article. It's only a matter of time: any biological species that has emotions will inevitably destroy themselves once their technology advances enough.
There was an "Outer Limits" episode about this back in the late 90s. A disgruntled physics student builds a couple of small fusion bombs, showing that it was actually very easy once he figured out some key thing. He ends up dying in the end before he could cause utter disaster, but it's only a matter of time before other smart-enough people figure it out too, and then basically anyone can build a fusion bomb. If this actually happens in our reality, just imagine the implications: instead of some random nutcase shooting up a Waffle House or mowing down some women with a van, we'll have random nutcases setting off bombs that destroy entire cities.
It's not just nuclear bombs either. Frank Herbert wrote a fairly interesting book back in the early 80s called The White Plague, where basically a disgruntled biologist created an engineered virus which killed off almost all the women in the world. And surely everyone here remembers the movie "12 Monkeys". We're making impressive leaps now with genetic engineering; what's going to stop some nut from creating a virus that wipes out most of civilization before we can counter it?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @01:28PM (5 children)
We don't need rogue scientists or dictators. We are already working on eliminating ourselves, by simply rendering the planet uninhabitable by ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 25 2018, @03:21PM (4 children)
Maybe, but I'm not really convinced of that. Global warming isn't really threatening our existence, it's threatening our lifestyle. Rising sea levels will render lots of low-lying cities uninhabitable, sure, but there's plenty of land higher up; the problem is dealing with that. And extreme weather is a problem, sure, but it's not going to make humans go extinct, it's just going to make us want to stay indoors a lot more. Our future, environmentally, probably looks a lot like 1983's Blade Runner. That sucks, but it's not extinction.
We humans have been adapting to bad weather for much of our existence. It's the reason we're not all in Africa, and have spread around the world: we figured out how to deal with climates that we aren't biologically adapted for, and to take advantage of other food sources too. We're still doing it: people live on Antarctica now, which is only possible because of technology. We can do the same with whatever global warming throws at us, but it's going to suck if you live in a port city or like to spend time outside. But it isn't going to kill us off.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 25 2018, @04:55PM (3 children)
Climate change isn't just about sea levels. It's about preserving the massively complex biosphere we live in. Changes in one system effect others, these arent isolated processes.
My major concern is how this effects water supplies which is THE cornerstone to civilization. What happens when farmers cant grow food? Reservoirs dry up? Cities cant supply water to residents? Hydro plants shut down and become useless? Steam and coal plants shut down from lack of feed water? And so on. The short answer is doom.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:22PM
Don't worry!
The illusion of unlimited, cheap, clean drinking water will be with us for as long as humanity exists!
Oh, wait . . .
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:36PM
somewhat building on what GP said: this won't finish off humanity. If 90% of humanity died tomorrow, the human species would still be one of the most numerous mammalian species in the world. and the problems with water etc wouldn't really be problems any more.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 25 2018, @07:02PM
No, it's not doom. Sure, you might have some nasty resource wars, and you'll probably have giant famines with millions or even billions dead, but think about this: what happens if 6 billion people died tomorrow? We'd still have over 1.5 billion people. That's not extinction, it's just a massive shift in civilization. Humans have gone through that before, and didn't go extinct.
I'm not trying to minimize the consequences of climate change, I'm just pointing out that it's extremely unlikely to result in human extinction (unless you're predicting it'll lead to massive nuclear war). It might wind up looking like some horribly dystopic sci-fi where much of the population is dead and the survivors are living in walled-off areas to protect themselves from zombies or whatever, but that still is not extinction; humanity can bounce back from that1. Even Star Trek's official history had humans going through a horrible WWIII which presumably wiped out a lot of the population before Zephram Cochrane invented the continuum distortion drive and met the Vulcans. Climate change by itself can't kill us all off.
As for water supplies, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that the earth will turn into a desert. There'll still be plenty of water (most of the planet is covered in it), and even freshwater isn't going anywhere as long as there's evaporation, clouds, rainfall, etc. Where the water is located could certainly change, though, rendering much of our existing hydro infrastructure useless, and this could have catastrophic results for many places dependent on it. But that's not going to wipe out every human on the planet. A genetically-engineered virus created by a rogue scientist, however, really could. Easily-built fusion bombs probably won't, but they could potentially wipe out so many that civilization collapses and the survivors are unable to rebuild (I don't think global climate change will have such a dramatic effect so quickly that this would happen; it'll be slower and people will adapt).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:06PM (5 children)
Sometimes I use a similar argument about guns. But I'll just tell you what people tell me . . .
Fusion Bombs don't kill (billions of) people, People kill (billions of) People.
Fusion Bombs don't make humans extinct, People make humans extinct.
So stop focusing on the Fusion Bombs. Everyone should be allowed to have one. No registration, or they could come to take away our Fusion Bombs. No background checks, or this would exclude crazy people and others with increased chance of harming their neighborhood with Fusion Bombs. There is no regulations, no matter how sensible, that can be applied to Fusion Bombs. You can have my Fusion Bomb when you pry it from my vaporized, irradiated fingers.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday April 25 2018, @06:35PM (1 child)
The only thing to stop a madman with a fusion bomb, is a good guy with a fusion bomb.
We all should have fusion bombs, so that we can resist an oppressive government ordering our neighbors bomb-toting military members to turn their fusion bombs against our fusion bombs.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 25 2018, @08:48PM
But if people were only armed with knives, they would still kill other people!
But maybe slightly fewer people than with a Fusion Bomb. And it might be easier for a couple able-bodied persons to stop them.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday April 26 2018, @12:42AM (1 child)
A relatively few dedicated people can just pick up a fusion bomb from the US military. While not so simple, it is way easier than to make one. True, criminals did not do it, yet, but probably just because they see no practical value. If they find said value, they will arm themselves in no time.
P.S. No, there is no central strong security code dispatched from the president's doom case. A field commander can arm and send his rockets all by himself and his direct reports.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 26 2018, @01:13AM
He would have to remember that the secret arming code is 00000000
I know, I know, it was officially changed. Who wants to be that it's now 11111111 ? (missile shape, can't forget, easy to type under stress)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 26 2018, @12:44AM
Fuck that, I just want to chill my recreation nukes.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Thursday April 26 2018, @12:48AM (2 children)
Thus my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
Elaborated on here: https://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. I discuss that at length here [in Post-Scarcity Princeton].
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 26 2018, @01:15PM (1 child)
These things don't really make sense.
>Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Huh? Military robots are used to avoid humans dying in combat, both for ethical reasons (people dying is bad, so while you can't control the enemy you can at least try to minimize death on your side) and practical ones (your own soldiers are a valuable resource, you don't want to get them killed unnecessarily). No one is using military action to force people to work in factories; that's just a ridiculous claim. Currently, military force is mainly about control of resources and global economic power.
>Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land.
And then this line contradicts the one above, more correctly pointing out why military conflict exists in the modern age. It's about control of resources, which directly affects economic power.
>Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
There's a bit of a point there with the first clause, but not with the second. You can build ICBMs using technology from the 1960s. You can't build space habitats with 1960s technology; we're still nowhere near that level of capability 50+ years later. Granted, we haven't put as much effort into this as we could have, but still, there's a huge distance between developing nuclear missiles and building livable space habitats that could house millions or billions of people.
>Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
Huh? Letting people pick their skin color isn't going to change international political problems, besides most people actually like their skin color, they just don't like it when other people treat them badly because of it. And biological weapons can be designed by a handful of scientists in a lab; you can't create sufficiently large arcologies (it's spelled with a 'c', not a 'k'; if you had ever visited Arcosanti you'd know this) or "agricultural abundance" with a handful of people like that. We have lots of giant corporations like Monsanto working on the "agricultural abundance" bit, maybe not the way you'd like (terminator genes and all), but greater yields means greater profits for agribusinesses so it's not like they're working to keep food supplies limited), and honestly we don't really have any problems with shortages of food that come from agricultural problems. Shortages are caused by political problems only, and you can't fix that in a lab.
>they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all.
Sticking a bunch of computers in a building isn't going to magically create this "abundance" you keep waxing poetically about.
>Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else
No, it doesn't. Cheap computing doesn't do much to build those space-based habitats you mentioned earlier. We've had cheap computing for a while now and our capabilities for lifting mass out of this gravity well haven't changed much. Rocketry has gotten a little less expensive, but not orders of magnitude less, which you'd need for some of the sci-fi stuff you're dreaming of here. The main thing you really need is political change, and no amount of cheap computing will give you that, unless you're proposing to create an AI that we put in charge.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Friday April 27 2018, @02:04AM
Thanks for the reply. While you make good points, I'm focusing on a different aspect (or root cause level) of these things than you are -- i.e. *why* are people being sent to die in combat, as in "five whys". To address just one of your comments in more detail, cheap computing is a big reason we are getting cheaper space flight right now between cheap electronics, cheap command systems with a few people, and better designed materials and devices using CAD/CAM, simulations, shared knowledge through the internet, free and open source software, and more. So, cheap computing has made it cheaper to lift stuff into orbit. With cheaper computing and the consequences leading to things like cheaper solar panels or cheap hot/cold fusion and cheap laser launchers, prices will continue to fall.
I explored the idea of cheap computing fostering collaboration and simulation of habitats further in a Space Studies Institute conference paper in 2001:
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html [kurtz-fernhout.com]
https://kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf [kurtz-fernhout.com]
You wrote "The main thing you really need is political change...". And I agree -- but political change -- especially grassroots change -- often comes from new ways of thinking about issues. And changing that way of thinking is the reason for my point on focusing on the deeper irony behind so many resource allocation decisions these days. For a humorous twist on all this:
https://pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html [pdfernhout.net]
And from a parody I wrote in 2009:
"A post-scarcity "Downfall" parody remix of the bunker scene"
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openmanufacturing/8qspPyyS1tY/vZacyDL86DIJ [google.com]
Dialog of alternatively a military officer and Hitler:
Officer: "It looks like there are now local digital fabrication facilities here, here, and here."
Hitler: "But we still have the rockets we need to take them out?"
"The rockets have all been used to launch seed automated machine shops for self-replicating space habitats for more living space in space."
"What about the nuclear bombs?"
"All turned into battery-style nuclear power plants for island cities in the oceans."
"What about the tanks?"
"The diesel engines have been remade to run biodiesel and are powering the internet hubs supplying technical education to the rest of the world."
"I can't believe this. What about the weaponized plagues?"
"The gene engineers turned them into antidotes for most major diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer, and river blindness."
"Well, send in the Daleks."
"The Daleks have been re-outfitted to terraform Mars. There all gone with the rockets."
"Well, use the 3D printers to print out some more grenades."
"We tried that, but they only are printing toys, food, clothes, shelters, solar panels, and more 3D printers, for some reason."
"But what about the Samsung automated machine guns?"
"They were all reprogrammed into automated bird watching platforms. The guns were taken out and melted down into parts for agricultural robots."
"I just can't believe this. We've developed the most amazing technology the world has ever known in order to create artificial scarcity so we could rule the world through managing scarcity. Where is the scarcity?"
"Gone, Mein Fuhrer, all gone. All the technologies we developed for weapons to enforce scarcity have all been used to make abundance."
"How can we rule without scarcity? Where did it all go so wrong? ... Everyone with an engineering degree leave the room ... now!"
[Cue long tirade on the general incompetence of engineers. :-) Then cue long tirade on how could engineers seriously wanted to help the German workers to not have to work so hard when the whole Nazi party platform was based on providing full employment using fiat dollars. Then cue long tirade on how could engineers have taken the socialism part seriously and shared the wealth of nature and technology with everyone globally.]
Hitler: "So how are the common people paying for all this?"
Officer: "Much is free, and there is a basic income given to everyone for the rest. There is so much to go around with the robots and 3D printers and solar panels and so on, that most of the old work no longer needs to be done."
"You mean people get money without working at jobs? But nobody would work?"
"Everyone does what they love. And they are producing so much just as gifts."
"Oh, so you mean people are producing so much for free that the economic system has failed?"
"Yes, the old pyramid scheme one, anyway. There is a new post-scarcity economy, where between automation and a a gift economy the income-through-jobs link is almost completely broken. Everyone also gets income as a right of citizenship as a share of all our resources for the few things that still need to be rationed. Even you."
"Really? How much is this basic income?"
"Two thousand a month."
"Two thousand a month? Just for being me?"
"Yes."
"Well, with a basic income like that, maybe I can finally have the time and resources to get back to my painting..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.