Project Force: AI and the military – a friend or foe?

Artificial Intelligence is already part of our lives, and as the technology matures it will play a key role in future wars. The accuracy and precision of today's weapons are steadily forcing contemporary battlefields to empty of human combatants. As more and more sensors fill the battlespace, sending vast amounts of data back to analysts, humans struggle to make sense of the mountain of information gathered. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in – learning algorithms that thrive off big data; in fact, the more data these systems analyse, the more accurate they can be. In short, AI is the ability for a system to "think" in a limited way, working specifically on problems normally associated with human intelligence, such as pattern and speech recognition, translation and decision-making.