The computer was born in war and by war. Colossus was built in 1944 to crack Nazi codes. By the 1950s computers were organising America’s air defences. In the decades that followed, machine intelligence played a small part in warfare.
Now it is about to become pivotal. Just as the civilian world is witnessing rapid progress in the power and spread of artificial intelligence (ai), so too must the military world prepare for an onrush of innovation. As much as it transforms the character of war, it could also prove destabilising.
Today’s rapid change has several causes. One is the crucible of war itself, most notably in Ukraine. Small, inexpensive chips routinely guide Russian and Ukrainian drones to their targets, scaling up a technology once confined to a superpower’s missiles.
A second is the recent exponential advance of ai, enabling astonishing feats of object recognition and higher-order problem solving. A third is the rivalry between America and China, in which both see ai as the key to military superiority.
