The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - AI and Autonomous Weapons

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

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Today on the AI Daily Brief, we're discussing AI, autonomous weapons, and the conversations we need to have as a society. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Hello, friends, happy weekend. It being a weekend, of course, you know the drill. We are doing a long read, and this is a really, really interesting one. The piece is by Alex Karp and Nicholas Samoska of Palantir Technologies. And the framing of this piece which appeared in the Washington Post is autonomous weapons will be built.

The only questions are who will build them and for what purpose. I'm going to turn it over to an AI version of me to read the piece now, and then I will be back in a minute to have a conversation about it. New weapons will eclipse atomic bombs. Their builders ask themselves this question. On July 16, 1945, not long after dawn, a group of scientists and government officials gathered at a desolate stretch of sand in the New Mexico desert to witness humanity's first test of a nuclear weapon.

The explosion was described by an onlooker as brilliant purple. The thunder from the bomb's detonation seemed to ricochet and linger in the desert. J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had led the project that culminated in the test, contemplated that morning the possibility that this destructive power might somehow contribute to an enduring peace. He recalled the hope of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and philanthropist, that dynamite, which Nobel had invented, would end wars. After seeing how dynamite had been used in making bombs, Nobel confided to a friend that more capable weapons, not less, would be the best guarantors of peace.

He wrote, The only thing that will ever prevent nations from beginning war is terror. Our temptation might be to recoil from this sort of grim calculus, to retreat into hope that a peaceable instinct in our species would prevail if only those with weapons would lay them down. It has been nearly 80 years since the first atomic test in New Mexico, however, and nuclear weapons have been used in war only twice. at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For many, the bomb's power and horror have grown distant and faint, almost abstract. The record of humanity's management of the weapon, imperfect and indeed dozens of times nearly catastrophic, has been remarkable. Nearly a century of some version of of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. Billions of people and their children and grandchildren have never known a world war. John Lewis Gaddis, a professor

of military and naval history at Yale, has described the lack of major conflict in the post-war era as the long peace. The atomic age in the Cold War essentially cemented for decades a calculus among the great powers that made true escalation, not skirmishes and tests of strength at the margins of regional conflicts, exceedingly unattractive and potentially costly. Stephen Pinker has argued a broader decline of violence may be the most significant and least appreciated development in the history of our species. It would be unreasonable to assign all or even most of the credit for this to a single weapon. Any number of other developments since the end of World War, Two, including the proliferation of democratic forms of government across the planet and a level of

interconnected economic activity that once was unthinkable, are part of the story. The Great Powers calculus that has helped prevent another world war might also change quickly, but the supremacy of U.S. military power has undoubtedly helped guard the peace, fragile as it might be. A commitment to maintaining such supremacy, however, has become increasingly unfashionable in the West, and deterrence as a doctrine is at risk of losing its moral appeal. The atomic age could soon be coming to a close. This is the software century. Wars of the future will be driven by artificial intelligence,

whose development is proceeding far faster than that of conventional weapons. The F-35 fighter jet was conceived of in the mid-1990s, and the flagship attack aircraft of American and Allied forces is scheduled to be in service for 64 more years. The U.S. government expects to spend more than $2 trillion on the program, but as retired General Mark A. Millie, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently asked, do we really think a manned aircraft is going to be winning the skies in 2008?

In the 20th century, software was built to meet the needs of hardware, from flight controls to missile avionics. But with the rise of artificial intelligence and the use of large language models to make targeting recommendations on the battlefield, the relationship is shifting. Now software is at the helm, with hardware, the drones in Ukraine, and elsewhere, increasingly serving as the means by which the recommendations of AI are carried out.

and for a nation that holds itself to a higher moral standard than its adversaries when it comes to the use of force, technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapon system in the hand of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will only act as an effective deterrent if it is far more powerful than the capability of an opponent that would not hesitate to kill the innocent. Today's episode is brought to you by fractional AI, my go-to-AI devshop. When we wanted to build a specific AI product feature, what we called our AI Toolfinder bot, for super intelligent, we knew we needed incredible AI engineers that could build something fast, and so we turned to Fractional because they've got some of the best AI engineers on the

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this is it. Use code summer fun to join the summer challenge and get 50% off your first couple of months. You can get all the information you need at B-Super.AI. That's B-Supert.A.I. See you there. The trouble is that the young Americans who are most capable of building AI systems are often also most ambivalent about working for the military. In Silicon Valley, engineers have turned their backs, unwilling to engage with the mess and moral complexity of geopolitics. While pockets of support for defense work have emerged, most funding and talent continue to stream toward the consumer. The engineering elite of our country rushed to raise capital for video

sharing apps and social media platforms, advertising algorithms, and shopping websites. They don't hesitate to track and monetize people's every movement online, burrowing their way into our lives. But many balk when it comes to working with the military, the rush is simply to build. Too few ask what ought to be built and why. In 2018, about 4,000 employees at Google wrote a letter to Sundar Pichai, the chief executive, asking him to abandon a software effort known as Project Maven for the U.S. Special Forces that was being used for surveillance and mission planning in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The employees demanded that Google never build warfare technology, arguing that assisting soldiers in planning targeting operations and potentially lethal outcomes

was not acceptable. Google attempted to defend its involvement in Project Maven by saying the company's work was merely for non-offensive purposes. This was a subtle and lawyerly distinction, especially from the perspective of soldiers and intelligence analysts on the front lines who needed better software systems to stay alive. Diane Green, the head of Google Cloud at the time, held a meeting with employees to announce that the company had decided to end its work on the defense project. An article in Jacobin declared this an impressive victory against U.S. militarism, noting that Google employees had successfully risen up against what they believed was a misdirection of their talents. Yet the peace that those in Silicon Valley who are opposed to working with the

military and joy is made possible by that same military's credible threat of force. At Palantir, we are building software architecture for U.S. and allied defense and intelligence agencies that will enable the deployment of this century's AI weaponry. We should, as a society, be capable of carrying on a debate about the merits of using military force abroad without hesitating to provide those sent into harm's way with the software they need to do their jobs. What's most concerning is that a generation's disenchantment with and disinterest in our country's collective defense has led to a massive redirection of resources, intellectual and financial, towards sating the needs of consumer culture. The diminishing demands we place on the technology sector to produce

products of enduring and collective value are seeding too much power to the whims of the market. As David Graber, who taught anthropology at Yale in the London School of Economics, observed in a 2012 essay in the Baffler, the Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post-office, and mail-order catalog. The technology world's drift toward the concerns of the consumer has helped reinforce a certain escapism. Silicon Valley's instinct to ignore the important issues we face as a society in favor of the trivial and ephemeral.

Challenges ranging from national defense and violent crime to education reform and medical research have appeared to many people in the technology industry to be too intractable, thorny, and politically fraught to be worth addressing. One year after the revolt at Google, an uprising by Microsoft employees threatened to halt work on a $480 million project to build an augmented reality platform for soldiers in the U.S. Army.

The workers wrote a letter to Satya Nadella, the chief executive, and Brad Smith, its president, arguing that they did not sign up to develop weapons and demanding that the company canceled the contract. In November 2022, when OpenAI released its AI interface chat GPT to the public, it prohibited its use for military and warfare purposes. After the company removed the blanket prohibition on military applications this year, protesters gathered outside the San Francisco office of Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, to demand that the company end its relationship with the Pentagon and not take any military clients. Such outrage from the crowd has trained leaders and

investors across the technology industry to avoid any hint of controversy or disapproval, but their reticence comes with significant costs. Many investors in Silicon Valley and legions of extraordinarily talented engineers simply set the hard problems aside. A generation of ascendant founders say they actively seek out risk, but when it comes to deeper investments in societal challenges, caution often prevails. Why wait into geopolitics when you can build another app? And build apps they have done. A proliferation of social media empires systematically monetizes and channels the human desire for status and recognition. For its part, the foreign policy establishment has repeatedly miscalculated when dealing with

China, Russia, and others, believing that economic integration can be sufficient to undercut their leader's domestic support and diminish their interest in military escalation abroad. The failure of the Davos consensus was to abandon the stick in favor of the carrot alone. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping of China and other authoritarian leaders have wielded power in a way that political leaders in the West might never understand. On a visit to the United States in 2015, speaking to a group of business and political leaders in Seattle's Chamber of Commerce, she recalled with affection reading The Old Man and the Sea. He said that when he visited Cuba, he traveled to Coimar on the northern coast

that had inspired Ernest Hemingway's story of a fisherman and his 18-foot Marlin. She said he ordered a mojito, the author's favorite, with mint leaves and ice, explaining that he just wanted to feel for myself what Hemingway had been thinking when he wrote his story. The leader of a nation with nearly one-fifth of the world's population added that it was important to make an effort to get a deep understanding of the cultures and civilizations that are different from our own. We would be well advised to do the same. Our broader reluctance to proceed with the development of effective autonomous weapon systems for military use might stem from a justified skepticism of power itself. Pacifism satisfies our instinctive empathy for the

powerless. It also relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult trade-offs that the world presents. Chloe Morin, a French author and former advisor to the country's prime minister suggested in a recent interview that we should resist the facile urge to divide the world into dominance and dominated oppressors and oppressed. It would be a mistake and indeed a form of moral condescension to systematically equate powerlessness with piousness. The subjugated and subjugators are equally capable of grievous sin. We do not advocate a thin and shallow patriotism, a substitute for thought and genuine reflection about the merits of our nation as well as its flaws. We only want America's technology industry to keep in mind an important question, which is not

whether a new generation of autonomous weapons incorporating AI will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose. All right, back to real living NLW now. One of the things that strikes me is super interesting about this piece is that as much as the framework was theoretically, autonomous weapons and whether they should be built, it actually almost didn't even have the chance to get to that question. Instead, it was a rumination on the situation that has led us to a place where there's not even the appetite to have that conversation because military technology, defense technology, whatever you want to call it, is so out of favor that the technology industry rallies to force its companies to not participate in it. One thing that I'm not as sure about as these authors are

is that somehow engineers working on these other types of projects is a dereliction of opportunity. I think in general I find myself pretty unwilling to go out on a limb and critique what people are willing to spend their entrepreneurial energy on. However, to the extent that the argument is that there are big, broader categories of thorny and tractable problems that would benefit from some of that entrepreneurial energy, as opposed to the more consumer-facing applications, I certainly can agree with that. What's more, to the extent that Silicon Valley financing is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the sense that the availability of capital for a particular type of company is going to lead entrepreneurs to build that type of company, I also agree that more incentive to build

more complicated, challenging things in these thorny areas would be a good thing. One of the reasons that I have been so attracted to spend so much time in the AI space is that I think it's forcing these conversations in a way that we haven't really had to deal with. The extreme speed of AI, the inevitability of it, are forcing us to have extraordinarily uncomfortable conversations that we simply would have avoided in the past. That's across so many dimensions of copyright, IP, creator futures, economic rights, the very social contract that dictates what it means to contribute meaningfully to a society in a way, and what it means to get things out of it. And yes, it also implicates these questions of the military, of defense, of power. There are some interesting signs that the discourse in this area is starting to shift. Right now, the absolute hottest deal in the world is the latest round into defense technology company Anderil.

Katie Roof from Bloomberg reports that the $1.5 billion investment round was oversubscribed by $3.5 billion. I don't think this is just an anomaly for Anderil, although the company is extremely impressive. I think it reflects more broadly a shift in this particular conversation. My hope is that these types of discussions become more normal and that people of all types are willing to contribute to them. I'm very grateful to have a community in the AI Daily Brief listeners that are up for exactly that, and I look forward to the next time we get to talk about it.

For now, though, that is going to do it for the AI Daily Brief. Until next time, peace.