Military Ai
Nathan Hesford
Honors English 11
Mr. Stockwell
14 March 2013
Benefits of Military Artificial Intelligence
The significant advances of artificial intelligence have convinced the US military to increase spending into its research by at least $487 billion in an environment that is calling for budget cuts. With the help of these machines the death rate could be significantly reduced in the future. All contrary arguments come down to moral disagreements concerning the lack of human morals that bind most modern soldiers coupled with the ever present danger of hacking attempts. However, machines can be considered more consistent than a human and as the programs rapidly evolve it will become nigh on impossible to hack them. The rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence would greatly benefit the military as operation planning would be made easier, soldiers could be trained both better and faster and existing drone technologies could be further augmented.
Artificial intelligence is a complex subject that requires some background information to fully understand. One of the earliest definitions of "true" artificial intelligence was proposed by Alan Turing with the Turing Test. The idea behind this test was to have a human ask both a computer and a human a series of questions and then see if the tester could tell which was the computer. The AI did not necessarily need to answer all the questions correctly, it just had to give an answer similar to that a human would give. The test would also be done via text so that the computer would not have problems with mimicking human speech. Very few AIs have passed the test with the first occurring in 2012 as it was judged to be human 52 percent of the time. The other major factor in determining a true artificial intelligence was the Chinese Room Experiments by John Searle as an expansion of the Turing Test. In this experiment, Searle wanted to test whether an intelligence was actually interpreting language or just
Honors English 11
Mr. Stockwell
14 March 2013
Benefits of Military Artificial Intelligence
The significant advances of artificial intelligence have convinced the US military to increase spending into its research by at least $487 billion in an environment that is calling for budget cuts. With the help of these machines the death rate could be significantly reduced in the future. All contrary arguments come down to moral disagreements concerning the lack of human morals that bind most modern soldiers coupled with the ever present danger of hacking attempts. However, machines can be considered more consistent than a human and as the programs rapidly evolve it will become nigh on impossible to hack them. The rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence would greatly benefit the military as operation planning would be made easier, soldiers could be trained both better and faster and existing drone technologies could be further augmented.
Artificial intelligence is a complex subject that requires some background information to fully understand. One of the earliest definitions of "true" artificial intelligence was proposed by Alan Turing with the Turing Test. The idea behind this test was to have a human ask both a computer and a human a series of questions and then see if the tester could tell which was the computer. The AI did not necessarily need to answer all the questions correctly, it just had to give an answer similar to that a human would give. The test would also be done via text so that the computer would not have problems with mimicking human speech. Very few AIs have passed the test with the first occurring in 2012 as it was judged to be human 52 percent of the time. The other major factor in determining a true artificial intelligence was the Chinese Room Experiments by John Searle as an expansion of the Turing Test. In this experiment, Searle wanted to test whether an intelligence was actually interpreting language or just
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