“AI will be a massive disruptor”.
The reason for this virtual conference was your chairman’s belief that whilst much is heard about potentially catastrophic emerging and disruptive technologies (EDT) the policy community does not properly understand the security and defence effect they could have. Equally, the science and technology community are expert in their own specific fields, but few have an understanding about policy or geopolitics or, indeed, how such technologies could interact going forward to both the betterment or destruction of humanity.
The focus of the debate concerned the possibility of a TAG study in 2025 to both improve our own understanding of EDTs such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, machine-learning, Big Data, biotech, Nano-technologies etc, how they might interact in warfare, be it hybrid or hyperwar, to better enable a policy debate over ethics, law, resource allocation and conflict avoidance and limitation. Any such study would necessarily require the TAG to reach out to expert communities in each of the relevant fields.
There was some debate over the utility of such a study given that governments and institutions may well be undertaking such work, many results are necessarily highly classified, and there is already a significant body of literature devoted to these questions. There was a consensus that on balance such a study would be worthwhile both for TAG members and for the wider policy community, providing we could supplement our collective knowledge with sufficient specialist expertise.
What makes such technologies particularly dangerous is the ignorance of much of the political and high bureaucratic class in democracies about the nature, pace of development, potential, possible applications and effects across the multi-domain battlespace of hybrid war, cyber war and future hyperwar. There are parallels with the outbreak of war in 1914 when a failure to understand the proper effect of new technologies allied to a Russo-German miscalculations about their dominance of military science and the crushing of political imagination through escalating nationalism and jingoism on an unimaginable scale. It is essential to avoid what Kissinger feared as an eventual Sarajevo in cyberspace. China and Russia are already seeking dominance of such technologies, possibly, one day, with proportionately unconscionable damage to humanity.
Ultimately, government is about choice and choice by political leaders. But scientific progress means some choices over EDTs are now strategically unavoidable. With several Western governments carrying out , or about to carry out , strategic defence reviews or their equivalent it seems timely for a study that could establish some better understanding of both the threats and opportunities such EDTs and their interactions could pose/offer and, therefore, how far investment should be made in one basket of technologies as opposed to another.
Quantum computing could well prove to be the game changer. If, as seems possible, (although nothing is certain in this ultra-fast-moving field) there is a breakthrough in ‘QC’ within the next decade it would transform computing power. The shift from a binary digital system to “superpositioned” qubits , simultaneously existing in multiple states, could allow the creation of an artificially intelligent sociopath. (Or-if the technology were distributed, as it might have to be for maximum efficiency-a Leviathan). If pressed into service as a strategic defence automaton assemblages of AI could replace the human, ensure speed of light hyperwar, and assure a at least a temporary decisive advantage in warfare. However, such a temptingly major advantage might only be secured by effectively removing the human from decision-making and some, perhaps all, ethical restraint.
Finally, all this begs a question: can catastrophic (transformative?) EDT’s be controlled if the nature of such technologies and their interactions would so profoundly change the character, if not the nature of war, that no one today could really be sure of the direction of travel let alone its precise destination ?
Julian Lindley-French