There is a sense of uneasiness when the screen lights up. Excitement, yes, because you're being shown a new way to fight a war, having gained access to a perspective until now closed to human perception. But also modesty because the action is down below, a thousand miles below, and all the courage and suffering of the battle are so distant as to almost lose their human meaning. In a recent visit to Palantir's offices in London, I was able to witness first-hand how the firm's superior data technology really works. I have not been able to stop thinking about the experience ever since.

Work believes that one key is to train officers on how to work with AI "to get the best features of both humans and machines." Robert Work is a national security professional who served as U.S. deputy secretary of defense for both the Obama and Trump administrations. Success on the battlefield will increasingly come down to the ability to make faster algorithmically aided decisions. "The battle networks of the future will feature human-machine collaboration, and these things will operate at extremely high speed," Work says. "These are going to make battle networks that do not have AI obsolete."

NEW DELHI: The Army is now undertaking a major study headed by a senior Lt-General on advanced "niche and disruptive warfare technologies", which range from drone swarms, robotics, lasers and loiter munitions to artificial intelligence, big data analysis and algorithmic warfare. Sources on Friday said the aim of the "holistic study", which comes amidst the ongoing military confrontation in eastern Ladakh with China, is to bolster the conventional war-fighting capabilities of the 13-lakh strong Army as well as prepare for "non-kinetic and non-combat" warfare in the years ahead. China, of course, has been assiduously working to develop futuristic warfare technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI)-powered lethal autonomous weapon systems, towards its overall endeavor to usher in a major "revolution in military affairs (RMA) with Chinese characteristics". Indian Army's new land warfare doctrine in 2018 had stressed the need to sharpen the entire war-fighting strategy, ranging from creation of agile integrated battle groups (IBGs) and expansive cyber-warfare capabilities to induction plans for launch-on-demand micro satellites, directed-energy weapons like lasers, AI, robotics and the like. The new IBGs, after a similar study, have already started to take initial shape as self-contained fighting formations that can mobilize fast and hit hard.

We learned this week that the Department of Defense is using facial recognition at scale, and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said he believes China is selling lethal autonomous drones. Amid all that, you may have missed Joint AI Center (JAIC) director Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan -- who is charged by the Pentagon with modernizing and guiding artificial intelligence directives -- talking about a future of algorithmic warfare. Algorithmic warfare, which could dramatically change warfare as we know it, is built on the assumption that combat actions will happen faster than humans' ability to make decisions. Shanahan says algorithmic warfare would thus require some reliance on AI systems, though he stresses a need to implement rigorous testing and evaluation before using AI in the field to ensure it doesn't "take on a life of its own, so to speak." "We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which this will be playing out, maybe in microseconds at times. How do we envision that fight happening? It has to be algorithm against algorithm," Shanahan said during a conversation with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google VP of global affairs Kent Walker.

To talk about artificial intelligence today usually involves talking about automation, lost jobs, and whether your Uber or Lyft will be a self-driving vehicle in 5 years time. Taking a step back from the apps in our phones, however, and what begins to emerge is a larger fight between the US and China, AI superpowers whose contest will likely decide the course of human civilization. In January 2019, the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), whose role is to help spread ideas and innovation around the world, released a report that highlighted the rapid advance of AI patent applications across the world. According to the report, the United States and China's AI-related patent applications outstripped every other nation's by far. "The U.S. and China obviously have stolen a lead. They're out in front in this area, in terms of numbers of applications, and in scientific publications," said Francis Gurry, WIPO Director-General, at a news conference last month announcing the report.

Last month marked the 17th anniversary of 9/11. With it came a new milestone: we've been in Afghanistan for so long that someone born after the attacks is now old enough to go fight there. They can also serve in the six other places where we're officially at war, not to mention the 133 countries where special operations forces have conducted missions in just the first half of 2018. The wars of 9/11 continue, with no end in sight. Now, the Pentagon is investing heavily in technologies that will intensify them.

Technological advances represent great opportunities. Whether it's in the fields of medicine, transport, agriculture, commerce, finance or virtually any other domain, robotics, AI and machine learning are having a transformative effect by advancing how we analyze and act upon data from the world around us. It makes sense that this technology be considered for national security and defense purposes, which is why it's not a surprise that we are seeing many countries invest heavily in AI and in military robotic systems with greater autonomy.