Can Track II Dialogues be the New “Ping-Pong” Diplomacy to Thaw the Sino-US Relationship on Military AI?
China and the US find themselves increasingly enmeshed in a deteriorating relationship as the two countries contest for primacy across many fields. Both Beijing and Washington view technological leadership, especially an edge in artificial intelligence (AI), as vital to gaining an upper-hand in this intensified power contest. As the two rivals scale up investment in […]
AI and Drones in the Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Challenging the Expectations?
By Ingvild Bode and Anna Nadibaidze Military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and their impacts on warfare have received much attention over the past years. Russia has been portrayed as a central actor in these debates, not least since President Vladimir Putin declared that whoever leads in the field of AI “will become ruler of […]
The New Fog of War: Algorithms, Computer Vision, and Weapon Systems
War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth. — Carl von Clausewitz (1832) [1873] The visual dimension is one of […]
AI and Robots in Soviet and Russian Popular Culture
In this article, Anna Nadibaidze explores the artificial intelligence narratives in Soviet and Russian popular culture.
The Future of the GGE and Denmark’s Silence in the Debate about Autonomous Weapons Systems
On 17 December 2021, after eight years of (both informal and formal) discussions about the challenges raised by autonomous weapons systems (AWS), states parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) decided on a mandate that dissatisfied many. The Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on LAWS should meet for 10 days in 2022 to […]
The Algorithmic Turn in Security and Warfare
On 6 – 7 January 2022, the AutoNorms project and the Center for War Studies (CWS) held the virtual conference “The Algorithmic Turn in Security and Warfare”. Functional applications of artificial intelligence (AI) based upon machine learning algorithms are in the process of fundamentally reshaping a diverse range of social, business, legal, and political fields. […]
Shortening the Kill Chain with Artificial Intelligence
This post has been guest written by Jennifer Rooke. Jennifer’s author information has been included at the end of this post. In a speech at the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyberspace Conference held on 20 September 2021, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall stated (at 20:50 in the embedded video) […]
A Rare East-West Alignment? Learning about Chinese Positions on Weaponised Artificial Intelligence from the Chinese-language Literature
The development, deployment and use of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) is a subject of growing scholarly debate. China is no exception to this trend. To provide a better understanding of Chinese perceptions of weaponised Artificial Intelligence (AI), this article briefly examines relevant Chinese-language sources available from the Knowledge Resource Integrated Database of the China National […]
Drones in Afghanistan: Not a Technological “Silver Bullet”
[A shorter version of this piece was published in the German-language ct Magazin für Computertechnik in September 2021, Ingvild Bode & Tom Watts] The United States and its NATO partners have ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan. One of this war’s many legacies will be the use of remotely piloted aircraft – colloquially referred to as drones – to conduct air […]
Can the UN GGE Go Beyond the Eleven Guiding Principles on LAWS?
The first session of the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on emerging technologies in the area of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) took place from 3-13 August 2021, in Geneva. After a delay caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, states parties to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) could formally continue the discussion […]
