The militarization of AI is coming. Can tech companies (and the rest of us) live with it? - SiliconANGLE

Everybody knows that artificial intelligence is an exceptionally weaponizable technology. So it's no mystery why militaries everywhere are racing to exploit AI to its maximum potential. Autonomous vehicles, for example, will become the most formidable weapon systems humanity has ever developed. AI gives them the ability to see, hear, sense, and adjust real-time strategies far better and faster than most humans. It will almost certainly produce casualty counts in future battles that are staggering and lopsided, especially when one side is almost entirely composed of AI-powered intelligent weapons systems equipped with phalanxes of 3-D camera, millimeter-wave radar, biochemical detectors and other ambient sensors. There's no point in dancing around a huge and growing controversy in the AI industry: the appropriateness of tech vendors such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon Web Services Inc. assisting the U.S. Department of Defense in developing AI technologies not just for offensive purposes, but also for defensive and back-office applications that can sustain this country's war-making bureaucracy.