Coordinating Artificial Intelligence: Six Lessons from the US

In a single day, the US's reconnaissance aircraft and satellites collect more raw data than the entire defence workforce could analyse in their aggregate lifetimes. Security officials are trying to find needles in ever-expanding digital haystacks. As a recent RUSI paper recognises, this information overload is also'perhaps the greatest technical challenge facing the UK's national security community'. Over the last year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University, I explored how defence and intelligence organisations are using artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to that overload. Beyond the technology itself, I wanted to find out how the US has created the foundations for successfully deploying AI: a skilled workforce, data management, computational power, cloud platforms, technical foundations of security and trust, and a prudent policy framework.