Sitting Out of the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race Is Not an Option

Stone once described arms races as the inevitable product of there being "no limit to the ingenuity of science and no limit to the deviltry of human beings." This dark truth about the era of human-controlled "kinetic" weapons of mass destruction that so concerned Stone remains true today of the emerging range of increasingly automated systems that may now be fusing scientific ingenuity with a silicon-based deviltry of all its own. For most of history, from stones to siege guns, warfare consisted of hurling some amount of mass with sufficient energy to do serious harm. The general trend has been toward increasing mass and energy, giving weapons greater range. Yet, until the first automated guidance systems came into play during World War II, the "information content" of weaponry was quite small, reducing accuracy.