The U.S. on Tuesday approved the sale of 360 million worth of armed drones and loitering munitions to Taiwan as Washington doubles down on helping Taipei counter a potential Chinese attack on the self-ruled island. The move reflects U.S. efforts to not only bolster the self-ruled island's asymmetric capabilities but also to use drone swarms to offset any Chinese military advantages in personnel and equipment in a possible conflict -- a strategy also embraced by Taipei as it draws lessons from the war in Ukraine. Announced by U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the potential sale, which must be approved by Congress, includes 291 warhead-equipped Altius-600M drones and 720 Switchblade 300 anti-personnel and anti-armor loitering munitions, marking the 15th arms package approved by U.S. President Joe Biden's administration.

AI and weapons of the future are very concerning. Since the early days of computing, scientists have been exploring artificial intelligence's potential to impact various aspects of life. In recent years, AI has begun to play a more significant role in multiple industries, like transport, finance, and manufacturing. But as always, we can also use revolutionary technology for warfare. Also Watch: A drone that can dodge anything thrown at it.

Russia's recent missile and drone strikes on Ukraine have highlighted three war developments. Firstly, Iran appears to be playing a significant role in arming Russia. And finally, this new level of intensity means Ukraine is going to need help from the West if this new influx of missiles is to be stopped. In recent weeks, despite Iranian and Russian denials, images of the Shahed-136 drones, their distinctive delta wings silhouetted against the sky, have circulated around the global media. In Kyiv, tower block residents watched in horror as the drones flew below their windows, the lawnmower-like whine of their engines clearly heard, as they purposefully made their way to intended targets.

International attempts to regulate the use of autonomous weapons, sometimes called "killer robots", are faltering and may be derailed if such weapons are used in Ukraine and seen to be effective. No country is known to have used autonomous weapons yet. Their potential use is controversial because they would select and attack targets without human oversight. Arms control groups are campaigning for the creation of binding international agreements to cover their use, like the ones we have for chemical and biological weapons, before they are deployed. Progress is being stymied by world events, however.

Editorial note: due to the time-sensitive nature of this topic, we are releasing this to all readers immediately rather than only to our paying subscribers. This is a first in a series of articles covering the impact of AI in Russia's war against Ukraine; subscribe to read future ones. You can support Ukraine with these highly rated charities. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."[1]

Russia's war in Ukraine is becoming a testing ground for loitering ammunition. How is artificial intelligence changing the future of military deterrence? The Russian attack on Ukraine shows that wars of conquest are not an artifact of the past. This reversion to an outdated notion of territorial integrity of states, visible since 2014 at the latest, puts the concept of deterrence back on the political agenda of many democracies. The new German government now wants to make the contribution to NATO that the then U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, demanded with media attention a few years ago.

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the backdrop, the United Nations recently held a meeting to discuss the use of autonomous weapons systems, commonly referred to as killer robots. These are essentially weapons that are programmed to find a class of targets, then select and attack a specific person or object within that class, with little human control over the decisions that are made. Russia took center stage in this discussion, in part because of its potential capabilities in this space, but also because its diplomats thwarted the effort to discuss these weapons, saying sanctions made it impossible to properly participate. For a discussion that to date had been far too slow, Russia's spoiling slowed it down even further. I have been tracking the development of autonomous weapons and attending the UN discussions on the issue for over seven years, and Russia's aggression is becoming an unfortunate test case for how artificial intelligence (AI)–fueled warfare can and likely will proceed.

Military applications of artificial intelligence, we are told, are poised to transform military power. They might make the oceans transparent to sensor systems, threatening at-sea nuclear deterrent systems like the UK's Trident. They might enable autonomous aircraft that could outfight human crewed planes. They could transform intelligence processing in war, enable all sorts of complex weapons that would make things like tanks and aircraft carriers yesterday's news. The sky, it appears, is the limit. In this light, big states are making large investments in military AI. One aspect of the UK's recent Integrated Review (ahem, "Global Britain in a Competitive Age") and Command Paper (ahem, "Defence in a competitive age") is a bet that investment in military applications of artifical intelligence will offset cuts to things like tanks and troop numbers.

An AI arms race is already underway. That's the reality we have to deal with," Maas told DW, speaking in a new DW documentary, "Future Wars -- and How to Prevent Them." "This is a race that cuts across the military and the civilian fields," said Amandeep Singh Gill, former chair of the United Nations group of governmental experts on lethal autonomous weapons. "This is a multi-trillion dollar question." This is apparent in a recent report from the United States' National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. It speaks of a "new warfighting paradigm" pitting "algorithms against algorithms," and urges massive investments "to continuously out-innovate potential adversaries." And you can see it in China's latest five-year plan, which places AI at the center of a relentless ramp-up in research and development, while the People's Liberation Army girds for a future of what it calls "intelligentized warfare." As Russian President Vladimir Putin put it as early as 2017, "whoever ...

In brief Machines are like humans – they're lazy. When given the chance to take the easy route to complete an easy task, they will. Academics at the University of Washington found that algorithms trained to diagnose COVID-19 from chest X-rays often look at secondary features, such as a patient's age, rather than focusing on the images themselves – something known as shortcut learning. "A physician would generally expect a finding of COVID-19 from an X-ray to be based on specific patterns in the image that reflect disease processes," said Alex DeGrave, a medical science student at the American university and co-author of a paper published this week in Nature Intelligence. "But, rather than relying on those patterns, a system using shortcut learning might, for example, judge that someone is elderly and, thus, infer that they are more likely to have the disease because it is more common in older patients. The shortcut is not wrong per se, but the association is unexpected and not transparent. And, that could lead to an inappropriate diagnosis."