The Pentagon’s First AI Strategy Will Focus on Near-Term Operations — and Safety
The Pentagon’s First AI Strategy Will Focus on Near-Term
Operations — and Safety
By Patrick TuckerFEBRUARY 6, 2019
The document is intended to make commander
think through the implications of their new artificial-intelligence tools.
The Defense Department will unveil a new
artificial intelligence strategy perhaps as early as this week, senior defense
officials told Defense One. The strategy—its first ever—will emphasize the
creation and tailoring of tools for specific commands and service branches,
allowing them to move into AI operations sooner rather than later.
“DOD has spent the past 50 years treating AI as
a [science and technology] concern. This strategy reflects an additional
imperative, which is to translate the technology into decisions and impact in
operations,” said one official with direct knowledge of the strategy.
Much like the new Joint Artificial
Intelligence Center, the future of
military AI will take its cue from Project Maven, which applied
artificial intelligence to sorting through intelligence footage. One official
described Maven as “a pathfinder” but cautioned, “the strategy is much broader
than one project.”
While the military has long played a key role
in AI development by helping to fund the design of programs such as
Apple’s Siri, the Department is preparing for its future by trying to
learn from private industry — particularly “the small number of companies that
do this well,” the official said. “We’ve studied their path to success and
we’ve gleaned lessons from … those in industry who are on a journey to
transform themselves.”
Safety First
One thing the new strategy won’t do, the
official said, is alter the military’s philosophy on using autonomous systems
in combat. Under a 2012
directive, a human operator must always be available to oversee and
override an autonomous weapon’s actions.
Indeed, one reason the new strategy will focus
on more immediate, operational applications of AI—as opposed to more
theoretical applications in the far future—is to force operators and commanders
to think through safety and ethical implications as they figure out what they
want AI to do for them. “When you translate the tech into impact in
operations, you have to think more seriously about ethics and safety,” said the
official. Safety “is a major focus and the language [of the strategy] is very
clear about how important we consider these topics.”
The Pentagon’s AI ambitions suffered a setback—or
at least the appearance of one—last spring when hundreds of Google employees
petitioned the company to end work on Project Maven.
Since then, the Pentagon has taken a number of
steps to appease Silicon Valley employees and executives who are skeptical, or
hostile to the notion of, helping the military harness AI. The department is drafting a set of
ethical principles and is reaching out to academia and
ethicists to help.
In December, a group of ethicists affiliated
with New York University’s AI Now Institute published a white paper spelling
out the reservations many programmers and technologists have with the military
use of AI. "Ethical codes can only help close the AI accountability gap if
they are truly built into the processes of AI development and are backed by enforceable
mechanisms of responsibility that are accountable to the public interest,” it
reads. One Google employee involved in the company’s Project Maven protest told
Defense One that a list of ethical principles would be unlikely to persuade the
individual that partnering with the military would be a good idea.
In other words, the Department still has lots
of convincing to do.
The strategy will also focus on building what the official
described as an AI-ready workforce. The official pointed to the success of
massive open online courses (augmented by live classroom instruction) and AI
boot camps such as Google’s Machine Learning
Ninja camp as private-sector examples of how to quickly train people
to work on machine learning. “Here again we’re looking to those companies that
either succeeded in systematically transforming their workforce industry,” the
official said.
Comments
Post a Comment