Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the emerging technologies that has generated the most waves in the military domain. AI has been incorporated by number of militaries such as the US, China and Russia in their military operations. Its military application includes surveillance and reconnaissance missions, cyber operations, command and control, logistical and analytical support. The most prominent military application of AI can be witnessed in autonomous robots and drones that hold the capability of take-off and landing, gather data, and tracking and following people without human interference. It is also embedded in avionics that helps that piolet collect and analyses the exponential data within second whereas previously the piolets had to read the manual data appearing on the screen to make the analysis. Moreover, militaries are also benefitting from the dual use AI applications such as same facial recognition technology that is used by police to catch the criminals can be used by the militaries to identify and track the enemies. Additionally, AI is also being used to produce realistic looking photos, audios and visuals commonly known as deep fakes. This application can be embedded in military domain to conduct information operations and spread propaganda and misinformation.
Another emerging technology that is raising ethical and legal concerns is Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS). The reason that LAWS has generated this debate as due to the fact that these weapon systems hold the capability to taking the control of the weapon out of human hand and into the hands of the machine itself. LAWS has pushed the human out of the loop hence known as fully autonomous weapons. There are partial autonomous weapons knowns as semi-autonomous weapons where the human is on the loop and has partial control over the weapons.
Comments are closed.