A.I. and its Military Implications : Daily Current Affairs

Date: 01/09/2022

Relevance: GS-3: Science and Technology-developments and their applications.

Key Phrases: Artificial Intelligence, Human intelligence, Surveillance, Valuable intelligence, Cybersecurity, Malicious network, Harm to human being, Bias decision, Data and Privacy, Strategic risks, Ethical concerns, Group of Governmental Experts, UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, Confidence-building, Risk-reduction measures.

Why in News?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in planning and supporting military operations and becoming a key tool in intelligence and analysis of the enemy's intelligence.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition.
It is an emerging technology that facilitates intelligence and human capabilities to sense, comprehend, and act with machines.
The historical evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) dates back to the year 1996 when Deep Blue AI defeated the then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.
The year 2019 witnessed geopolitical paradigm where there was a race for technological supremacy between superpowers. It is estimated that by 2034-40, 50 per cent of the jobs would be automated in world. i.e. within the next 15 years.

Scope of Using AI in Military:

The dual-use characteristic of AI ensures that any upgrades in its development and deployment for civilian purposes can also be applied to their military counterparts, and vice versa. like.

States can recognise AI as a force multiplier in military operations that grants its users an upper-hand against rivals by contextually processing large amounts of data. like.
- Identifying trends, patterns, people and objects of interest;
- Piloting systems and processes in both critical and non-critical military functions;
- Predicting and recommending courses of action that may help in aiding, or in some cases even replacing, human decision-making in high-stakes, time-sensitive situations.
Surveillance:
- AI with geospatial analysis can help in the extraction of valuable intelligence from connected pieces of equipment such as radars and automatic identification systems.
- This information can help in detection of any illegal or suspicious activities and alert the concerned authority.
- Robots with AI and computer vision with IoT can also help in target identification and classification.
- For ex. Facial recognition softwares have been employed by the Israeli army to find and track Palestinian military objectives.
- The same softwares are also being used by the Ukrainian defence ministry to identify potentially undercover or deceased Russian soldiers.
Arms and Ammunition:
- New-age weaponry now comes with AI-embedded technology.
- For example, sophisticated missiles have the capability to determine and analyse the target range for kill zones without any human intervention.
Cybersecurity:
- In defense circles, cyberspace is now being considered as the four war-front after land, sea, and air.
- A compromised and malicious network can severely compromise the security of the whole region.
- Defence establishments are using machine learning to predict and protect from unauthorised intrusions.
- This intrusion detection is usually done by classifying the network as normal or intrusive. AI-based techniques help in increasing the accuracy of such classification.
AI-based computer vision programmes for self-driving cars like Tesla have been used by Azerbaijan to navigate autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
In the United States, algorithms that customise what-to-watch lists for individual users on streaming platforms, are projected to become part of the cognitive equipment of the armed forces to advise soldiers in communications-denied or resources-constrained environments.
AI can enable military teams to maintain or expand warfighting capacity without the need to increase or upskill personnel strength, both of which require time and additional recurring costs that militaries may not be able or willing to spare.

Risks associated with using AI technology in military:

There are various challenges and potential dangers of using AI technology:

Harm to human beings:
- AI systems can be purposefully programmed to cause death or destruction, either by the users themselves or through an attack on the system by an adversary.
- Unintended harm can also result from inevitable margins of error which can exist or occur even after rigorous testing and proofing of the AI system according to applicable guidelines.
- Indeed, even ‘regular’ operations of deployed AI systems are mired with faults that are only discoverable at the output stage.
Bias decision:
- AI can perpetuate biases either unintentionally or intentionally and can be vulnerable to attack or hacking.
- Since these systems are often trained on large datasets, they tend to replicate the same biases that were present in the original datasets. Similarly, personal biases of developers of algorithms may further add to this problem.
- A study tracking publicly available instances of bias in 133 AI systems across industries from 1988 to 2021 discovered that 44.2 percent (59 systems) demonstrated a gender bias, and 25.7 percent (34 systems) exhibited both gender and racial biases, due to the quality of the datasets used to train these systems as well as their algorithms.
Data and Privacy:
- The protection of personal data in the AI environment may be a serious challenge wherein there may be trade-off between privacy and prosperity.
Ethical Risks:
- Ethical risks are important from a humanitarian standpoint.
- The ethical considerations and governance issues of AI may be redefining regulations and governance with focus on fairness, safety, reliability, privacy, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability.
Strategic risks:
- Strategic risks include the possibility that AI will increase the likelihood of war, escalate ongoing conflicts, and proliferate to malicious actors.

Recommendations:

Organize, train, and equip forces to prevail in a world in which military systems empowered by AI are prominent in all domains.
Understand how to address the ethical concerns expressed by technologists, the private sector, and the public.
Conduct public outreach to inform stakeholders of the military's commitment to mitigating ethical risks associated with AI to avoid a public backlash and any resulting policy limitations.
Follow discussions of the Group of Governmental Experts involved in the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and track the evolving positions held by stakeholders in the international community.
Seek greater technical cooperation and policy alignment with allies and partners regarding the development and employment of military AI.
Explore confidence-building and risk-reduction measures with other states attempting to develop military AI.

Way forward:

The development and use of AI, especially in military applications, is still nascent and holds neither clarity on how it is being developed across the board nor a standardised approach towards regulating what already has been or what is in the pipeline to be developed and deployed.
It is now becoming increasingly common to see technology outpacing the law, and more so in areas such as military AI which are pioneers of motivated technological innovation. While AI would generally be seen as a positive value-laden technology, at the end of the day, it is just another tool in use by the military, and has its inherent strengths and weaknesses like any other.
As such, it needs to evolve within a governance framework that guides its effective and ethical use, and prevents it from being vulnerable to potential misuse, inefficacy or redundancy.

Source: ORF-Online

Mains Question:

Q. What is the scope of using Artificial Intelligence in Military? Discuss the risk associated with using AI technology in military? (250 words).