The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere. The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike. FILE PHOTO: A serviceman walks past anti-aircraft defence mobile missile systems during the Keys to the Sky competition at the International Army Games 2017 at the Ashuluk shooting range outside Astrakhan, Russia August 5, 2017. The computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of human.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere. The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike. If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.

The Singapore government is setting up an advisory council to assess the legal and ethical use of AI (artificial intelligence) and data as well as recommend policies and governance. This would help build "a trusted ecosystem" and ensure consumer confidence, as the country continued to develop its digital economy and new business models emerged, said industry regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). It added that various stakeholders including consumers, ethics boards of private organisations, and academia would be approached for feedback–specifically, on a discussion paper to be released by the Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC), detailing the development and adoption of AI, and support the advisory council's efforts.

Should artificial intelligence be used as part of weapons systems? Last week, Google cancelled its contract with the US Department of defence to develop a machine vision system known as Project Maven, which would analyse imagery captured by military drones to detect vehicles and other objects, track their motion and provide data to the military. The company's employees signed en masse a letter to the company's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, stating that such a project would outsource the moral responsibility for the application of their work to a third party, and that they were not prepared to countenance Google or its contractors building what they referred to as "warfare technology". This term of course makes clear what has for many decades been a convenient euphemism: renaming the business of developing weapons and technology for warfare as "defence". The British establishment adopted this figure of speech in 1964, when the War Office – which had existed under that name since 1857 – passed over its functions to the Ministry of Defence. Google's repositioning is not the first example of pressure being applied to stop AI from being developed for military applications.

After more than a year, NASA's Curiosity rover has successfully delivered rock powder extracted from the Martian surface to one of its two onboard labs, regaining the critical ability to analyze surface samples on the red planet. The deployment of the lab on May 31 marks a major milestone for the agency, which has worked extremely hard to fix Curiosity's drilling and sample analysis capabilities. The technology-rigged rover's original drilling mechanism suffered a number of issues in 2016 and lost its upward and downward movement by the end of that year. The problem kept the robotic vehicle from extracting and analyzing Martian rock samples and severely affected the mission. However, the team of scientists at NASA worked on a percussive method called feed extended drilling, wherein the force of rover's extended robotic arm is used to push the drill forward into the rock in a freestyle manner. On May 20, the method worked as the agency expected and Curiosity was able to drill into a rock named Duluth.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military is increasing spending on a secret research effort to use artificial intelligence to help anticipate the launch of a nuclear-capable missile, as well as track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and elsewhere. The effort has gone largely unreported, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of near impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. But U.S. officials familiar with the research told Reuters there are multiple classified programs now under way to explore how to develop AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike. If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.

Low intensity of research: A lack of data hinders potential research work at homegrown companies or in the academic world. Not only is the volume of data scarce, its quality is also often deemed questionable. Inadequate expertise, manpower, and skilling opportunities: Unlike the US and China which have hundreds of educational programmes in data science and AI, India has next-to-nothing. Though the country churns out over a million engineers every year, a dismal 4% of AI professionals in the country have worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks. High resource cost and low awareness: Professionals skilled in areas such as AI and data analytics come at a far higher cost than other techies in India.

Pentagon will be increasing their spending on a secret research which uses artificial intelligence to foresee launching of a nuclear-capable missile. According to Reuters, the system will also track and target mobile launchers in North Korea and the rest of the world. Reuters reports that the research is kept top secret, and the few publicly available details about it are buried under a layer of nearly impenetrable jargon in the latest Pentagon budget. However, U.S. officials familiar with the research said that there are multiple classified programs now underway which plan to use AI-driven systems to better protect the United States against a potential nuclear missile strike. If the system proves to be operational it will be able to think for itself, analyzing huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans.

If the research is successful, such computer systems would be able to think for themselves, scouring huge amounts of data, including satellite imagery, with a speed and accuracy beyond the capability of humans, to look for signs of preparations for a missile launch, according to more than half a dozen sources. The sources included U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the research is classified.

India is trying to master third generation warfare, going by the statements from the Centre. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman recently stated that Artificial Intelligence can be used in a wide range of areas, including guarding the country's borders and securing outer space. Ajay Kumar, Secretary, Defence Production, too thinks AI can be used by all the three forces as it would be a "big area" in future warfare. A 17-member task force headed by Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekaran has been set up to look into this area. Countries are spending billions of dollars to collaborate with tech giants to use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to produce weaponry for New Age warfare.