Military Deception: AI's Killer App? - War on the Rocks

This article was submitted in response to the call for ideas issued by the co-chairs of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Eric Schmidt and Robert Work. It addresses the first question (parts a. and b.), which asks how artificial intelligence will affect the character and/or the nature of war, and what might happen if the United States fails to develop robust AI capabilities that address national security issues. In the 1983 film WarGames, Professor Falken bursts into the war room at NORAD to warn, "What you see on these screens up here is a fantasy -- a computer-enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles, they're phantoms!" The Soviet nuclear attack onscreen, he explained, was instead a simulation created by "WOPR," an artificial intelligence of Falken's own invention.