AI Spotlight: Paul Scharre On Weapons, Autonomy, And Warfare

Paul Scharre is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He is the award-winning author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, which won the 2019 Colby Award and was named one of Bill Gates' top five books of 2018. Aswin Pranam: To start, what classifies as an autonomous weapon? Paul Scharre: An autonomous weapon, quite simply, makes its own decisions of whom to engage in the battlefield. The core challenge is in figuring out which of those decisions matter.