How AI is Transforming War

this is a battlefield where both armies have the same weapons capabilities but one of them has Ai and the other does not let's see how a battle between these two plays out in the process we'll learn why Vladimir Putin once told a group of young students that whoever leads in AI will rule the world and why the White House recently issued its first memo on AI calling it an era defining technology with significant and growing relevance to National Security to understand this I've teamed up with shash shank Jo hello good afternoon Johnny the defense editor

at The Economist who's likely one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to this topic we're beginning to see artificial intelligence pretty much in every single decision made in war so let me show you how artificial intelligence is transforming War so let me clarify this is not a sponsorship with the economist there's a sponsor later on in the video this is a partnership and kind of a dream come true to work with this newspaper that I've been reading since I was in college studying international relations so I'm really just shouting them

out because I feel an immense amount of gratitude for what they've taught me about the world in addition to their excellent short form video they've also started giving away access to their short form news app called espresso for free to high school and college students who are over 16 super cool again not a sponsor I just want to get the word out here so now let's get back into this video the examples that compel people the most are often the munition the weapon system the thing that does the killing right and this is the killer

drone the killer robot but what I think is that often the key decisions in war are not the ones at the very end they're not the ones that happen just before a bomb goes bang and I think that's where AI is really affecting the battlefield the most Okay so we've made these two hypothetical armies here on the battlefield both of these armies are effectively trying to do the same thing they're both trying to somehow get eyes into enemy territory to find the enemy's most valuable military targets to fix their exact location to determine what weapons

to use and how to properly Target and deploy them and then to actually fire on those targets to engage so that it actually Hits the Target and then finally to assess to see if it worked this is called the killchain and it is how war is fought but executing this killchain is not straightforward it's the job of commanders on both sides to make countless decisions often with incomplete or unreliable information and victory tends to favor those who can gather the best information and make accurate decisions the fastest so let's see how both both of these

sides approach their kill chain one with AI and one without hey before we get back onto the battlefield um I'm currently in my home with a sweatband on because I am exercising which is something I have to do every day to be a happy adult I'm telling you all this because it has to do with the sponsor of today's video who is train well which is a platform that connects you with a personal trainer who designs a workout for you that you can do right in your home using this very cool app so here's how

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for consistency for me if you want to try this out you can get 14 days for free if you use the link in my description go. TRW well.net Johny Harris clicking that link helps support the channel but it also getes you 14 days for free on this platform I appreciate trawell for sponsoring today's video for supporting our journalism we are now going to leave my home go back onto the battlefield to see how AI is changing the nature of [Music] War well militaries will use what they call sensors to go find things that could be

anything that looks at the world both sides have all sorts of sensors that are looking into their enemy territory the classic example is an electrooptical sensor on a satellite right in that's fancy words for a camera that is just looking at stuff they both have drones in the air scanning for targets a reconnaissance team on the ground they've got radar sensing what's flying through the air the data from these sensors is being recorded and eventually is sent back to a Central Command Center this is where the decisions are made on what the Army will do

next using all of this data from their sensors so someone has to be sifting through all of the satellite images and this is where we see the first big Advantage for the side with AI computer vision object recog has just exploded in how good it is if you look back at the way that AI broke through and advanced around 2012 it was picking out images in particular recognizing images of cats and if you can recognize a cat you can recognize a tank the AI Command Center is armed with computer vision software that is processing all

of this incoming visual data and tagging it with what they think they're looking at and its precise location now you have machines automatically looking over those images picking out enemy planes enemy formations and saying hey I think with 90% probability that I'm pretty sure is a tank and I've worked this out on the Drone itself the exact coordinates it's at the other military that doesn't have ai is doing the same thing but without computer vision [Music] algorithms there's a lot of friction in this process you had humans pouring over every single image they're slowly identifying

their targets a tank here an Airfield there plotting them on a map doing it manually oh and by the way this map only exists here in this Command Center they haven't even started communicating all of these targets and intelligence to other command centers meanwhile the computers over in this other Command Center are automatically adding all of their findings to a database that's in the cloud that other command centers have access to as well an AI enabled Army is Fus using all kinds of data mobile phone records data from ship tracking websites aircraft tracking websites consumer

retail activity who is buying Products near this Naval base or near that Airfield that might indicate activity so you're fusing these vast torrents of data spitting out anomalies so their maps are filling up much quicker filling up with potential targets and even context on each of these targets a commander who sees the targets then has to decide a lot of things are they going to hit them or not is it valuable enough what am I going to use do I use a plane an artillery battery something else these are all basically the bread and butter

of any Command Decision but this is still just the beginning of the killchain these are hard decisions but the AI enabled Commander has some help a software platform has fused all of this data together and is starting to make predictions and inferences giving recommendations to the Commander taking into account not only the target they're trying to hit but also many other important factors I know that you have this many planes I know that you have this much fuel on the Airfield this much ammunition here is the optimal way to destroy that Target using these aircraft

coolant fuel oil repairs rest for the crew food for the crew these are all so fundamental so a lot of the stuff that was being done in your headquarters by dozens of mid-level officers with pens papers spreadsheets can be done by software so a human might be able to do all of these things but it might take them like a couple of days to do it the code can do it in like a tenth of the time way way more quickly so while the traditional Army is still manually plotting potential targets the AI Army's Commander

is looking at a list a list generated by his software a list of targets the software is proposing that they could hit a group of tanks that they found near the front line they could take out a bridge that serves as an important supply line they could Target an Ammunition Depot that the AI believes that most of the enemy's ammunition reserves are being held the commander evaluates these recommendations from the software and decides to Target the Ammunition Depot using some artillery cannons that the software has confirmed have recently been serviced and have plenty of ammunition

for this operation he Taps a few buttons on a screen and a mix of humans and software start preparing to engage this all happened very quickly and over on the other side they're just starting to assemble an initial list of valuable targets the AI enabled Commander now has time to think about other potential targets its software is recommending that he send a swarm of drones with explosives attached to them to destroy this Fleet of enemy tanks and here's where we see yet another massive advantage of AI these drones are piloted by humans but as they

get closer and closer to their target the enemy sends out jamming signals to interfere with the connection between the pilot and the Drone suddenly I'm not able to Pilot my drone because there's all this radio noise overwhelming the signal the pilot can no longer control the Drone what if the Drone didn't need to have a pilot thanks to recent advances in AI this drone can start flying itself it is looking at the object it's comparing it to a library of images stored on the platform and it's saying I know I am supposed to hit this

thing so it locks on to the Target and it says I am going to just keep going I can maneuver to that Target in the final last 100 m 200 M 300 M of flight that's a real shift in the character of Warfare when you have that Precision guidance not just on Exquisite high-end systems but on so many tiny little systems throughout the battlefield you can see where this is going the AI enabled Army is able to pull off these attacks much quicker with way more information all enabled by algorithms that are crunching huge amounts

of data so even though these two armies have the same Hardware what matters more and more is what's inside what really matchs is the software what really matchs is the algorithm inside okay so this was a hypothetical and simplified scenario but in the real world this is effectively the direction that Warfare is going relying more and more on software let's go through a few examples like in Gaza where the Israeli military uses data from tapped phones and people's locations to algorithmically choose targets to strike as a kind of AI Target system generating huge numbers of

targets per day of suspected Hamas militants according to six Israeli soldiers speaking to an Israeli publication the IDF has based a lot of its air strikes off of AI generated lists treating these Target lists in their words quote as if it were a human decision now the IDF does dispute this characterization but the point is AI algorithms are already being being used on the battlefield to choose targets then there's Ukraine Ukraine above all is going to be the key test bed because that's where we're seeing some of the most advanced military AI play out on

both sides tested experimented the major Innovation here has been in drones something we made a whole video about more and more software and computer vision is allowing these drones to complete the final leg of their flight to hit their target even when the signal has been jammed and the pilot has lost control of the Drone here in the United States we are seeing more and more Tech startups who are preparing for this new form of warfare one that relies so much more on sensors and data and algorithms that can make sense of it all to

make wartime decisions this is all about autonomy and that will be delivered more than anything else by software the US military has been developing an AI system that can take a massive amount of aerial and satellite imagery and pick out potential enemy targets sometimes more accurately than humans can the UK has a similar program and because data from sensors is such a huge part of this capability you see more cloud computing companies like Amazon and Microsoft getting involved in defense one data analytics company paler works a lot in defense now and says that their software

allows the US military to conduct an operation that used to require 2,000 people and now they can do it with just 20 because software can now do a lot of that work of analyzing synthesizing and helping make decisions that used to be the work of lots of people the holy grail for any military trying to get ahead on this is to aggregate all of the data from all of their many sensors into one integrated Platform One Central command software that can help commanders make decisions the US Army is working on one ambitious project that does

just that project convergence uses high-tech equipment the Army says is more efficient and faster than humans so these are just a few examples of real world applications of AI being integrated into war there are so many more and there will continue to be new programs and initiatives as this technology changes and as we learn if it really does all the things that proponents say it can do then there are some people who will draw a comparison to things like the Advent of gunpowder okay but wait shouldn't we slow down and ask yes we can do

this this is something that technology allows us to do now but is it ethical is it legal is it safe could it get out of control if we give more and more information and decisionmaking abilities to a computer will AI make war easier and quicker will taking humans out of the process make it less hum A lot of people who are against what they call Killer Robots will say a human must always retain control over the decision to use Force you know do I kill them or not I think that's the wrong way to think

about it the bit that will always be most controversial is the final lethal decision you could argue the really consequential step was taken when you identified something as a Target in the first place would we rather have a commander who is pressing a red button to approve a Target that's offered to him by a computer but is is mashing the red button on Loop saying yep yep yep that doesn't seem like human control to me even though from a technical perspective yeah they're signing off on each Target but they're doing so without any real engagement

moral or intellectual with what they are doing like any technology it's not one way or the other it comes down to how well we understand it and how we use it Shashank argues that what's most important isn't whether or not we give decision-making and autonomy to these machines but whether or not the human who is in control and actually making the decisions based on what the machine is telling them understands the software what it's good at and what it's not whereas if you have a computer system that is offering a bank of targets and the

commander is scrutinizing those and knows the system he knows what it's been trained on and therefore he knows when it might work effectively and when it might not and he knows when not to rely on it he knows when to question it when to mistrust its inputs that seems to me much more like human control even if he is seeding quite a lot of control in some circumstances but holding it back in others for me that is the debate it's way more complex than you know hand over to the Killer Robots or not it's when

are you trusting the systems when what do you know about them have you interrogated them to understand what their weak spots are that to me is really where the debate should be as we saw earlier in war whoever can get the most information and make the most accurate fastest decisions is usually the Victor humans tend to assume that decisions made by a machine are correct which makes us particularly prone to be swooned by AI generated information I mean I feel this when I talk to chat gbt I often feel a bias to believe it cuz

it sounds right the machine just spit it out in this digestible authoritative natural language so there will be a lot of incentive and momentum to let the machine do a lot of the work to make decisions quickly and deal with the consequences later something we may not be able to catch until it's too late machines are going to make mistakes they'll do some horrible things they will encourage you to bomb a building that you thought was a military Target that turns out to be a shelter for civilians but hey guess what humans do that as

well the question is are machines going to reduce the incidence of those things the reality is there's no going back no one's going to pump the brakes on integrating AI technology into Warfare no one's going to wait for the ethicists and the lawyers to decide if this is ethical or legal or safe geopolitics will force this forward all we can hope for is is wisdom and foresight from those making the decisions on how we use these systems so that we approach it humanely and responsibly the future is going to be humans working with AI to

wage war [Music] thank you trawell for sponsoring today's video for supporting our journalism when you click that link it helps support the channel and it gets you in on a discount 14 days for free [Music] [Music]