The future of AI in the military is not killer robots

For all our fears about Terminator-style killer robots, the aim of AI in the U.S. military is likely to be on augmenting humans, not replacing them. Why it matters: AI has been described as the "third revolution" in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear weapons. But every revolution carries risks, and even an AI strategy that focuses on assisting human warfighters will carry enormous operational and ethical challenges. Driving the news: On Tuesday, Armenia accepted a cease-fire with its neighbor Azerbaijan to bring a hopeful end to their brief war over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. An even bigger game-changer would be if such armed drones were made fully autonomous, but for the foreseeable future such fears of "slaughterbots" that could be used to kill with impunity appear overstated, says Michael Horowitz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.