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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: 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.