Innovations in intelligence-gathering have always changed how we conduct wars, from spyglasses to surveillance satellites, and what we currently call artificial intelligence, along with the evolution of autonomous vehicles, is no exception.
Project Maven is an account of how the U.S. Department of Defense has been coping with these changes (or not), incorporating dozens of interviews and documents into a provocative and troubling narrative.
Focusing on the efforts of a Marine Corps intelligence officer who, in 2017, recognizes the importance of the emerging capabilities of AI, this book also details the bureaucratic complications created by accelerating technological innovation & its implications on various battlefields across the globe.
It's about what you’d expect when the “move fast & break stuff” mentality of the tech sector runs up against opaque & often petty machinations of Pentagon bureaucracy, enlisting the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir into a competitive melee that often had even the military branches themselves working at cross-purposes.
After all, when budget cycles run in years while combat adaptations occur daily (case study: Ukraine), how is a government supposed to keep up? This is how we get caught building multi-million-dollar missile interceptors that get outfoxed by over-the-counter drones. This is how an armored tank gets neutralized by a guy wielding a video-game controller.
As we automate more and more of our combat processes (from surveillance to target acquisition to kinetic response), moral quandaries crop up, all based on the question of whether we should allow a machine to decide when & how to kill a human. (Btw, we basically already are.)
It seems, barring some unforeseen development, that gone are the days of an armed squad of soldiers humping through terrain in order to make contact with the enemy, and this book is a wakeup call to everyone who hasn’t realized this. The real question is whether or not automated warfare (one side’s AI versus another side’s) will result in more warfare or less.
Indeed, there are indications that if AI technology keeps evolving in the direction we can foresee, the very definition of warfare itself may change. Instead of nation-states conducting military conflicts over contested territory, what if warfare becomes a constant state of global violence conducted everywhere by unclear assailants?
This book doesn’t posit any answers because it’s frankly too early to tell. What Project Maven does do, however, is vividly illuminate the complexities at hand.
Get Project Maven here: https://a.co/d/0fjtQbi1
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