The Great Race for Military AI and Quantum Computing Is On

On the second day of the COSM 2021 conference, speakers asked -- with appropriate skepticism -- whether we could ever produce true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). But the final day of the conference hosted a conversation on the realistically achievable forms of AI and quantum computing that may pose existential threats to modern life. Robert J. Marks, Director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence (which hosted COSM) -- also Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor University -- spoke first. The title of his 2020 book, The Case for Killer Robots: Why America's Military Needs to Continue Development of Lethal AI, provides an unsubtle hint at his position. Marks thinks that AI will never be "will never be sentient. It will never understand what it is doing. And, currently, it has no common sense."