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Artificial Intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war

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Military AI optimists predict future AI assisting or making command decisions. Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen argue that, at a fundamental level, these predictions are dangerously wrong.

Image courtesy of interviewee. July 9, 2024

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This video discusses the authors' criticisms of overly optimistic views regarding the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. They express dissatisfaction with prevailing narratives that hype the capabilities of AI without adequately addressing their limitations and specific functionalities. The authors explore the concept of military command and decision-making, arguing that current AI technologies, which often operate through inductive reasoning, lack the ability to adapt to the unpredictability and complexity of real-world military situations.

They critique the common belief that AI could revolutionize warfare by making faster decisions based on vast data, asserting that such claims oversimplify the nature of warfare itself. The authors highlight the importance of understanding the philosophical and conceptual frameworks underpinning both AI and military strategy, suggesting that many proponents of AI in a military context fail to recognize that war involves unique, singular events rather than repetitive tasks that AI excels at processing.

Moreover, they emphasize that the decision-making required in war is often influenced by variables that can’t be quantified or predicted, challenging the notion that AI can perform as effectively as human commanders in such complex environments. They conclude by calling for a more nuanced understanding of AI's capabilities and emphasizing that current technologies cannot replicate the human experience and judgment necessary for effective military leadership. Overall, the authors advocate for a more critical examination of the relationship between AI technologies and warfare realities.

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Here are some articles and resources that discuss similar themes regarding artificial intelligence in warfare, critiques of its potential, and the complexities involved in military decision-making:

1. **"The Limits of Artificial Intelligence in Military Applications"** - This article critiques the assumption that AI can significantly enhance military capabilities. It discusses the limitations of AI technologies when applied to complex, unpredictable warfare scenarios.

2. **"AI and the Future of War: Debunking Myths"** - This piece addresses common misconceptions about AI in combat situations, exploring the differences between expectation and reality regarding AI's role in military decision-making and strategy.

3. **"Human Judgment vs. AI in Combat: Why Machines Can't Replace Leadership"** - An examination of why human intuition, experience, and ethical judgment are integral to military command, contrasting these qualities with the limitations of AI in real-time decision-making.

4. **"The Unpredictability of Warfare: Challenges for AI Integration"** - This article discusses the unpredictable nature of conflicts and how AI systems, primarily based on data-driven approaches, struggle to adapt to new and evolving battlefield conditions.

5. **"Revolutionizing Warfare or Overselling AI? Analyzing Military Applications"** - This analysis critiques the hype surrounding AI technologies in military convideos and calls for a realistic assessment of their capabilities and limitations.

6. **"Decision-Making in Warfare: The Role of AI and Human Commanders"** - A thorough discussion on the juxtaposition of AI decision-making processes and the human element in warfare, emphasizing the importance of understanding convideo, nuance, and unpredictability.

7. **"Why AI Can't Fully Take Over Military Strategy"** - An exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of military strategy and the unique nature of warfare that challenges the belief that AI can fully replace human command.

8. **"The Ethical Implications of AI in Warfare"** - This article delves into the ethical concerns surrounding the automation of military commands and the limitations that current AI technologies face in addressing moral questions in warfare.

These articles collectively reflect on the limitations of AI in military applications, the complexities of warfare, and the critical need for human judgment in decision-making convideos.

X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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The paper, idea emerged

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because of a dissatisfaction that Blevin

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and I had with sort of very optimistic accounts of

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what artificial intelligence might be able

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to do in war and conflict.

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Specifically with this kind of hype around the technologies,

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there's a lack of detail about what

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specific capabilities different models have.

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And so we saw an opportunity to

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delve a bit deeper into the capabilities

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and link those specifically to how,

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certain optimistic accounts are saying they might be used

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in a future war.

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Um, in the process, we started digging more into what kind

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of ideas about war these accounts had,

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and that in a sense they were subtly twisting the

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definitions of what war command strategy,

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these big concepts, very important concepts,

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actually mean.

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And in the process for doing a bit of a slight of hand

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of sort of, a shell game of swapping things around,

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perhaps not always being particularly clear about,

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what their sort of true, meaning was in the sense

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of the sort of reasoning

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that different artificial intelligence models can do.

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That was where we bring in these distinctions

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between inductive

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and abductive reasoning, which is a very common way

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of dividing up different ways

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of making arguments in the philosophy of science.

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And, mainly building off

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of Eric Larson's work on the Myth of ai,

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and moving that across, over onto the, the military context.

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Many of the arguments in the, well,

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what we've called the AI optimist literature tend to argue

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that narrow artificial intelligence,

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or those that do machine learning, all learn,

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play particular kinds of games, they

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are basically able

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to interpret much more data than humans can

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and do so much faster, and

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therefore make faster command decisions,

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which are inherently better.

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That's, that's a, that's an argument a lot of the,

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writers in war studies strategy, security interations,

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are making about some of these technologies

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and possible implications.

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So these AI commanders would naturally out

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outside outshine their human equivalence

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because faster, harder, better, stronger, as,

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as great UNK on goes.

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Um, but, there were problems with that, with

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that literature that we saw.

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So, the literature that we're calling AI optimism,

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there are of course differences in variances

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within literature.

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They're not a monolith, so,

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so there are variations within, within them.

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And Cameron and I found it difficult to form sort of a, a

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common understanding between the authors

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because the arguments were actually quite contradictory, not

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between the authors, but within the author's own argument.

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So it was difficult to pin down any sort

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of coherent argument other than a belief in a potentially

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transformational nature of these AI software systems.

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Um, and some of the arguments, you know, are in terms

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of, because they can play chess

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and they beat some humans at a game of chess,

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it means they can do war.

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Now they can, they can command a, a unit on a battlefield.

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'cause surely war is just like chess.

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Um, and if a machine can do it much faster,

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more aligned within people,

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then the same should be true for war.

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Um, that machines would also be able to use unbiased data

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or be able to have unbiased data sets and

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therefore make unbiased decisions

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or be better than humans at finding objectively correct,

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decisions in a tactical or a strategic, situation.

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There were different in co contradictory claims then about

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are these things transformational or complementary?

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And some authors would argue both.

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And some would also say, well, we agree that it is

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transformational, but we don't really know what

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that transformation is.

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Usually, if something is transformational,

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you should be able to explain exactly how, especially

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because transformational things are usually quite large

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and easy to identify.

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So, so these arguments are just quite contradictory

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and unsatisfying really,

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because we, we weren't really seeing

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where the transformation was coming from.

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Where, you know, where AI capabilities are useful is

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where they're already being used,

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and that is to as language writing assistance, to make

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plausible sounding sentences or paragraphs

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or short writing, statements or in analyzing

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and collecting lots of raw digital data.

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So, getting terabytes of images from satellites

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and then scanning them very quickly to find things

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that obviously look like tanks, trucks, aircraft,

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various kinds of impacts on the ground, bomb craters,

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things that you can identify with some level of confidence

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and get a machine just to do a quick scan of thousands

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and thousands and thousands of images,

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and then provide a curated selection of data to,

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to human analysts.

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So AI has already been used for that.

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Um, another area is in,

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ballistic missile defense systems

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or air defense systems where a lot of radar signatures

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and data are collected and processed

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and then presented to humans

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because they don't have the time

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to process all the raw data themselves.

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So those are very limited uses,

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and they're complimentary or they're evolutionary steps.

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It's about making existing processes faster within military

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systems or intelligence bureaucracies.

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We are not seeing the transformational elements of it.

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Some of the, major arguments in the field are also about

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a human AI teaming or a center strategy, as some call it.

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And again, this is not necessarily a remarkably novel

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argument because humans have used machines for a very,

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very long time in all facets of life.

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And what we're talking about here is

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software defined automation as opposed to,

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hardware defined automation.

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So, and, you know, a, a car that can,

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keep going at cruise speed, well,

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that's a mechanical automation.

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Now we're getting software that can do more routine things

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by itself to speed up human activities.

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So the capabilities we are actually talking about

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when you look at the technology, it's just not

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as revolutionary transformational

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as the claims about these big new commanders.

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Um, taking to the battlefield, can be,

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or doing the work of a staff officer, for example.

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It's, it's one thing

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to automate the processing of the raw images.

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It's something else entirely to have a machine

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that can give you novel military command insights on how

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to take this fortification on the hill,

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or how to convince the cabinet

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to support your strategic war plan.

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Those are all important aspects of command.

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And unfortunately,

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the arguments take battlefield technologies too far

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and focus too much often on battle, as well

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as the only category of command decisions.

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The fundamental disagreement that we had then

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with the literature almost was they had framed

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the problems as purely technical,

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and that over time the technology would get better

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and these technical problems would go away.

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Whereas we see their problems ultimately at this

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philosophical and conceptual level about

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how they think about war

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and how they think about what command decisions are.

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The reason that AI is useful for things that are, sort

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of very laborious,

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long-winded tasks is because they're repetitive.

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If things are repetitive, you can train the machine

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to do it reliably over time.

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But in warfare, if you're a squad leader

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or you know, a, a general, even the situation

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that you're faced with is totally unique.

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It might be similar in some ways to other things

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that happened in history, but it's not something

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that you can do a thousand times before

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and then, you know, it comes up just like you planned.

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That basically never happens in, in warfare.

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And we know that from history

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and philosophers like sitz expand this actually in their,

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in their military theory, the way in which they use evidence

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of success with different artificial intelligence

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or machine learning systems,

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and kind of blend them all together as if they're all sort

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of the same kind of evidence.

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Um, and then use that as a block to say, look,

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AI is doing a really wonderful job

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and it can do anything inside that bag of evidence, though,

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there's different kinds of machines.

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So you have expert systems like, you know, deep blue,

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the chess playing computer, it gets referenced a lot.

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There was Watson who, won the US TV show Jeopardy,

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and that was again, a, a different kind of system.

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There's the Alpha Go

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and other related systems that play the go, game.

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And these are actually in some ways making very different

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kinds of, decisions.

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Um, so Deep Blue was a machine which made decisions in a

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deductive manner, which means that

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it looked at all the possibilities

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and then almost through a process of elimination worked out,

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which was the best, move to make in a chess game.

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And you can do that if you know what all

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of the possibilities are,

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which again, a human being can't do.

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That's probably not how humans play chess,

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but a machine can, and it gets great results,

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but it's a very specific kind of decision making.

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The way that, the current generation

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of machine learning works is to make probabilities

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and gather all of these probabilities together in a model.

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It weighs up all of these different variables

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and then produces a conclusion which effectively says,

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I'm concluding this because of the evidence.

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So I I I, this is probably the right answer, is

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what the machine is effectively always concluding,

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always saying probably this.

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So these are very distinctive things,

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and by comparing that to military history

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and military theory, we can see that neither

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of these two ways of thinking are what

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military commanders use in practice.

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It's a relatively straightforward and,

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and well-known point in philosophy of science,

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that these different forms of logic,

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can't transform into one another.

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So if you are using inductive reasoning,

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you are always in this probabilistic way of thinking.

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You can't just do loads and loads of induction

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and then that turns into these other kinds of reasoning.

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Um, so the classical problem of induction,

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is commonly attributed to, to David Hume,

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who's an 18th century philosopher.

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And in a sense, it, it's been handed down to us particularly

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as social scientists in this, truism that we have.

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That correlation doesn't equal causation,

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and that's really the core of it.

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If you keep seeing the same, things correlated together.

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Um, then David Hume is a total skeptic on this,

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and he says, ultimately you can never actually know

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that just because these two things always seem to happen one

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after another that you have discovered anything about.

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Cause people made fun of David team and still do that.

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If you actually adopted this thinking all the time in your

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life, then you'd be, you know,

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when you walk down the stairs in the morning

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to have breakfast, you'd be worried that you were gonna fall

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through the stairs because suddenly matter was solid.

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But then, you know, you've got no reason to think

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that your stairs will be solid tomorrow

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just because it was yesterday.

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And in in effect.

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I mean, this is gonna upset probably some philosophers

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of science, but that's okay.

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'cause we're kind of, we're strategic studies people

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that we use other kinds of logic like abductive reasoning,

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to sort of get round these fundamental limitations.

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And we use different kinds of reasoning altogether

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that complement each other to actually exist in the world

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and make sensible decisions at the moment.

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Machines can't swap between these kinds of reasoning.

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Some of the proponents of machine learning say

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that some of the models can do abductive inference, which is

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to, to appeal

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to the best possible explanation for something.

12:58.855 --> 13:01.555
So rather than saying it's probably this to say,

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I've done a kind of, an an educated guess,

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and I think this is the best possible explanation

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of something, their definition of what

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that is is actually different to what philosophers

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of science consider it to be.

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And it's a much thinner version.

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Um, and so what they've tried to do, these,

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these technologists have said,

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here's my inductive based machine learning

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and it can do induction so well,

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that I can actually do some abductive reasoning now.

13:31.375 --> 13:33.715
But people like Larson

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and many others have pointed out

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that this is just fundamentally not possible according

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to at least this version of Western philosophy.

13:42.255 --> 13:43.595
The kind of decisions that you need

13:43.595 --> 13:47.235
to make in war are fraught with uncertainty and the unknown.

13:47.615 --> 13:51.955
And, the high value put on surprisingly unexpected

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is anathema to the way that these inductive based

13:56.515 --> 13:57.635
software machines work.

13:57.815 --> 13:59.955
So if you're only ever trained on what's come

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before, there'll be no strategic or military

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or tactical creativity from that AI commander that you hope

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to make, make, make decisions.

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And what we found in our discussions when,

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when thing on the paper was, so our, our criticisms of,

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of these, of this AI literature is the same,

14:21.175 --> 14:24.195
but just coming from different, sort

14:24.195 --> 14:25.355
of philosophical traditions.

14:25.355 --> 14:29.335
So me having read Kitz all my academic career

14:29.675 --> 14:32.815
and Cameron coming from more a philosophy approach.

14:33.355 --> 14:35.335
Um, so we found that

14:35.335 --> 14:37.535
that was effectively the same, a powerful argument.

14:37.555 --> 14:39.175
And, and there was,

14:39.355 --> 14:41.495
and this is where the kitch vision of war, part

14:41.495 --> 14:44.135
of the title comes from because a lot of the understanding

14:44.135 --> 14:47.215
of what war is and what it entails for command is

14:47.215 --> 14:49.975
and reflected in a lot of the AI optimist literature.

14:49.975 --> 14:51.485
And when you look at the nature of war

14:51.485 --> 14:53.965
and the kind of commands needed, the AI systems

14:54.035 --> 14:55.845
that we have just can't do that.

14:55.875 --> 14:59.165
They can't base the decisions on the unknown,

14:59.475 --> 15:03.005
even known unknowns, let alone unknown unknowns.

15:03.125 --> 15:04.765
'cause there will be things nobody will have

15:04.765 --> 15:05.805
ever anticipated.

15:06.545 --> 15:10.445
And what we end up with, in the real world then is,

15:10.825 --> 15:15.085
the, the major general of the HMS PNA force.

15:15.145 --> 15:17.765
So this, so I'll explain the, the title a bit now.

15:17.865 --> 15:21.045
So what you end up is with, a machine

15:21.115 --> 15:25.005
that can have all the facts at its disposal, at its disposal

15:25.105 --> 15:28.165
and know almost everything that I can know,

15:28.945 --> 15:30.845
but it'll be completely terrible

15:31.105 --> 15:33.365
or useless at making the right decisions

15:33.785 --> 15:36.085
or doing leadership duties.

15:36.825 --> 15:40.525
Has no human empathy, no human understanding, no concept of

15:40.525 --> 15:43.205
what strategy as opposed to knowledge is.

15:43.785 --> 15:46.125
So we'll end up with something, with a,

15:46.285 --> 15:47.405
with an AI commander

15:47.515 --> 15:50.325
that can have all the facts about obscure topics,

15:50.745 --> 15:53.965
but will not be able to make reliably good decisions at war

15:53.965 --> 15:57.245
because it has no understanding of what war really is.

15:57.735 --> 16:00.765
There are frankly wrong perceptions

16:01.465 --> 16:04.525
and understandings of what these technologies are

16:04.985 --> 16:06.885
and what they can and they can't do

16:07.565 --> 16:10.685
proliferating in a number of important communities.

16:11.225 --> 16:15.845
So obviously in the academic community, these are logically

16:16.025 --> 16:18.405
and empirically flawed arguments

16:18.405 --> 16:21.765
and perceptions of the AI technologies and what they can do,

16:22.265 --> 16:25.485
but also theoretically flawed approaches to

16:25.595 --> 16:26.765
what war is as well.

16:27.145 --> 16:30.525
So there's a lot of unhelpful perceptions

16:30.525 --> 16:31.805
and understandings going around

16:31.905 --> 16:33.565
and in the academic community,

16:33.565 --> 16:37.005
which translates into the policy community as well,

16:37.025 --> 16:39.445
and also the wonk community as well.

16:39.705 --> 16:42.005
So the, advisors

16:42.025 --> 16:45.165
and experts in the national security defense

16:45.305 --> 16:48.085
and technology ecosystem, a lot

16:48.085 --> 16:49.925
of flawed understandings are flying around

16:50.105 --> 16:52.645
and you can't make good policy on

16:54.395 --> 16:59.285
invalid evidence, flawed logic and kitch theories of war.

16:59.785 --> 17:02.925
So that's sort of the fundamental sort of, so

17:02.955 --> 17:06.525
what we are trying to, correct that to try

17:06.525 --> 17:09.525
and show, this is where these arguments fall short

17:09.525 --> 17:11.685
because they, they haven't quite interrogated the

17:11.685 --> 17:14.565
fundamental nature of the technologies or the social

17:14.905 --> 17:17.645
and political phenomenon that they are engaging with.

17:18.425 --> 17:20.325
And an example could be that,

17:20.345 --> 17:23.565
and I've heard this in practitioner meetings I've had

17:23.565 --> 17:26.285
where they believe that military

17:26.285 --> 17:29.325
or security problems, even political ones, can be solved

17:29.505 --> 17:32.405
by trying to gain the whole system by

17:33.205 --> 17:36.405
quantifying everything, getting more data sets

17:36.825 --> 17:38.525
and more computing power.

17:38.945 --> 17:43.645
That's how you get, a machine that can decide, when

17:43.745 --> 17:45.205
to attack or retreat

17:45.305 --> 17:47.205
or when to, sue

17:47.265 --> 17:50.405
for peace versus antagonize, an enemy.

17:50.405 --> 17:53.045
Further, they think that things can be known,

17:53.075 --> 17:54.965
that all factors can be known

17:55.185 --> 17:57.565
and digitized, put into binary ones

17:57.565 --> 17:59.565
and zeros in a way that computers can understand.

17:59.565 --> 18:01.245
When we are operating in a social

18:01.305 --> 18:04.685
and political world where there are no, you know,

18:04.685 --> 18:08.325
obvious right or wrongs, there's very rarely objective,

18:08.915 --> 18:11.285
qualities to the information and the knowledge

18:11.285 --> 18:12.645
and the activities that we have.

18:13.425 --> 18:16.975
So this means then that policy makers are,

18:17.035 --> 18:18.855
are possibly not getting the right advice,

18:18.855 --> 18:21.135
information needed when,

18:21.415 --> 18:23.335
acquisitions discussions come up

18:23.335 --> 18:25.455
and investments in research and development.

18:25.795 --> 18:27.335
So there are many companies

18:27.435 --> 18:30.775
and military bureaucracies pushing various

18:31.455 --> 18:32.655
artificial intelligence projects

18:32.655 --> 18:36.135
that are making very grand claims about, we want

18:36.135 --> 18:39.455
to have an AI commander helping troops make, you know,

18:39.455 --> 18:42.175
difficult decisions when all it can do is present

18:42.175 --> 18:45.135
information in a certain way for better and worse.

18:45.595 --> 18:48.535
So the UK MOD has a project called Project Improbable,

18:48.705 --> 18:51.815
where it's very much is about trying to do the AI commander

18:51.815 --> 18:55.375
that the AI optimist literature says is just

18:55.375 --> 18:58.015
around the corner based on, well the,

18:58.035 --> 18:59.535
the flawed evidence that we present.

18:59.955 --> 19:01.615
Uh, another example could be, you know,

19:01.615 --> 19:03.735
palliatives artificial intelligence platform.

19:04.005 --> 19:07.175
Very grand claims about decision making capacities are being

19:07.175 --> 19:10.815
made and we would just, we are throwing skepticism on

19:10.815 --> 19:13.535
that based on argument and logic and evidence.

19:15.495 --> 19:19.815
Ultimately, we live in an age of, induction based

19:20.445 --> 19:23.255
machine learning slash artificial intelligence systems.

19:23.755 --> 19:28.415
And if we collectively as a national security community

19:28.415 --> 19:32.555
of academics and, and practitioners actually recognize that,

19:32.945 --> 19:34.875
then we might be able to understand

19:34.905 --> 19:36.675
what these technologies could be used for.

19:36.675 --> 19:38.955
Whereas at the moment, I think our sense is

19:38.955 --> 19:43.395
that people are dreaming very grand dreams about totally

19:43.395 --> 19:46.075
different kinds of technology that that don't exist.

19:46.735 --> 19:49.795
And at the moment, there's no technical development pathway

19:49.945 --> 19:53.995
that would actually lead us to, as a species, to having

19:54.025 --> 19:55.195
that technical capability.

"Debunking AI Optimism: A Critical Examination of Artificial Intelligence's Role in Warfare"

00:00:00 - The paper, idea emerged because of a dissatisfaction that Blevin and I had with sort of very optimistic accounts of what artificial intelligence might be able to do in war and conflict. Specifically with this kind of hype around the technologies, there's a lack of detail about what specific capabilities different models have. And so we saw an opportunity to delve a bit deeper into the capabilities and link those specifically to how, certain optimistic accounts are saying they might be used in a future war.
00:00:45 - of ideas about war these accounts had, and that in a sense they were subtly twisting the definitions of what war command strategy, these big concepts, very important concepts, actually mean. And in the process for doing a bit of a slight of hand of sort of, a shell game of swapping things around, perhaps not always being particularly clear about, what their sort of true, meaning was in the sense of the sort of reasoning that different artificial intelligence models can do. That was where we bring in these distinctions
00:01:23 - and abductive reasoning, which is a very common way of dividing up different ways of making arguments in the philosophy of science. And, mainly building off of Eric Larson's work on the Myth of ai, and moving that across, over onto the, the military context. Many of the arguments in the, well, what we've called the AI optimist literature tend to argue that narrow artificial intelligence, or those that do machine learning, all learn, play particular kinds of games, they are basically able to interpret much more data than humans can
00:02:06 - therefore make faster command decisions, which are inherently better. That's, that's a, that's an argument a lot of the, writers in war studies strategy, security interations, are making about some of these technologies and possible implications. So these AI commanders would naturally out outside outshine their human equivalence because faster, harder, better, stronger, as, as great UNK on goes. but, there were problems with that, with that literature that we saw. So, the literature that we're calling AI optimism,
00:02:46 - within literature. They're not a monolith, so, so there are variations within, within them. And Cameron and I found it difficult to form sort of a, a common understanding between the authors because the arguments were actually quite contradictory, not between the authors, but within the author's own argument. So it was difficult to pin down any sort of coherent argument other than a belief in a potentially transformational nature of these AI software systems. and some of the arguments, you know, are in terms of, because they can play chess
00:03:29 - it means they can do war. Now they can, they can command a, a unit on a battlefield. 'cause surely war is just like chess. and if a machine can do it much faster, more aligned within people, then the same should be true for war. that machines would also be able to use unbiased data or be able to have unbiased data sets and therefore make unbiased decisions or be better than humans at finding objectively correct, decisions in a tactical or a strategic, situation. There were different in co contradictory claims then about

"Questioning Transformational Claims: Analyzing the Limitations of AI in Military Applications"

00:04:10 - And some authors would argue both. And some would also say, well, we agree that it is transformational, but we don't really know what that transformation is. Usually, if something is transformational, you should be able to explain exactly how, especially because transformational things are usually quite large and easy to identify. So, so these arguments are just quite contradictory and unsatisfying really, because we, we weren't really seeing where the transformation was coming from. Where, you know, where AI capabilities are useful is where they're already being used, and that is to as language writing assistance, to make
00:04:52 - or short writing, statements or in analyzing and collecting lots of raw digital data. So, getting terabytes of images from satellites and then scanning them very quickly to find things that obviously look like tanks, trucks, aircraft, various kinds of impacts on the ground, bomb craters, things that you can identify with some level of confidence and get a machine just to do a quick scan of thousands and thousands and thousands of images, and then provide a curated selection of data to, to human analysts. So AI has already been used for that.
00:05:31 - ballistic missile defense systems or air defense systems where a lot of radar signatures and data are collected and processed and then presented to humans because they don't have the time to process all the raw data themselves. So those are very limited uses, and they're complimentary or they're evolutionary steps. It's about making existing processes faster within military systems or intelligence bureaucracies. We are not seeing the transformational elements of it. Some of the, major arguments in the field are also about a human AI teaming or a center strategy, as some call it.
00:06:15 - argument because humans have used machines for a very, very long time in all facets of life. And what we're talking about here is software defined automation as opposed to, hardware defined automation. So, and, you know, a, a car that can, keep going at cruise speed, well, that's a mechanical automation. Now we're getting software that can do more routine things by itself to speed up human activities. So the capabilities we are actually talking about when you look at the technology, it's just not as revolutionary transformational as the claims about these big new commanders.
00:06:54 - or doing the work of a staff officer, for example. It's, it's one thing to automate the processing of the raw images. It's something else entirely to have a machine that can give you novel military command insights on how to take this fortification on the hill, or how to convince the cabinet to support your strategic war plan. Those are all important aspects of command. And unfortunately, the arguments take battlefield technologies too far and focus too much often on battle, as well as the only category of command decisions. The fundamental disagreement that we had then
00:07:36 - the problems as purely technical, and that over time the technology would get better and these technical problems would go away. Whereas we see their problems ultimately at this philosophical and conceptual level about how they think about war and how they think about what command decisions are. The reason that AI is useful for things that are, sort of very laborious, long-winded tasks is because they're repetitive. If things are repetitive, you can train the machine to do it reliably over time. But in warfare, if you're a squad leader

"Distinguishing Decision-Making: AI, Probability, and the Unique Nature of Warfare"

00:08:16 - that you're faced with is totally unique. It might be similar in some ways to other things that happened in history, but it's not something that you can do a thousand times before and then, you know, it comes up just like you planned. That basically never happens in, in warfare. And we know that from history and philosophers like sitz expand this actually in their, in their military theory, the way in which they use evidence of success with different artificial intelligence or machine learning systems, and kind of blend them all together as if they're all sort of the same kind of evidence.
00:08:57 - AI is doing a really wonderful job and it can do anything inside that bag of evidence, though, there's different kinds of machines. So you have expert systems like, you know, deep blue, the chess playing computer, it gets referenced a lot. There was Watson who, won the US TV show Jeopardy, and that was again, a, a different kind of system. There's the Alpha Go and other related systems that play the go, game. And these are actually in some ways making very different kinds of, decisions.
00:09:39 - deductive manner, which means that it looked at all the possibilities and then almost through a process of elimination worked out, which was the best, move to make in a chess game. And you can do that if you know what all of the possibilities are, which again, a human being can't do. That's probably not how humans play chess, but a machine can, and it gets great results, but it's a very specific kind of decision making. The way that, the current generation of machine learning works is to make probabilities and gather all of these probabilities together in a model.
00:10:19 - and then produces a conclusion which effectively says, I'm concluding this because of the evidence. So I I I, this is probably the right answer, is what the machine is effectively always concluding, always saying probably this. So these are very distinctive things, and by comparing that to military history and military theory, we can see that neither of these two ways of thinking are what military commanders use in practice. It's a relatively straightforward and, and well-known point in philosophy of science, that these different forms of logic,
00:10:59 - So if you are using inductive reasoning, you are always in this probabilistic way of thinking. You can't just do loads and loads of induction and then that turns into these other kinds of reasoning. so the classical problem of induction, is commonly attributed to, to David Hume, who's an 18th century philosopher. And in a sense, it, it's been handed down to us particularly as social scientists in this, truism that we have. That correlation doesn't equal causation, and that's really the core of it. If you keep seeing the same, things correlated together.
00:11:44 - and he says, ultimately you can never actually know that just because these two things always seem to happen one after another that you have discovered anything about. Cause people made fun of David team and still do that. If you actually adopted this thinking all the time in your life, then you'd be, you know, when you walk down the stairs in the morning to have breakfast, you'd be worried that you were gonna fall through the stairs because suddenly matter was solid. But then, you know, you've got no reason to think that your stairs will be solid tomorrow just because it was yesterday. And in in effect. I mean, this is gonna upset probably some philosophers of science, but that's okay.

"Limitations of AI in Military Decision-Making: The Incompatibility of Inductive and Abductive Reasoning"

00:12:23 - that we use other kinds of logic like abductive reasoning, to sort of get round these fundamental limitations. And we use different kinds of reasoning altogether that complement each other to actually exist in the world and make sensible decisions at the moment. Machines can't swap between these kinds of reasoning. Some of the proponents of machine learning say that some of the models can do abductive inference, which is to, to appeal to the best possible explanation for something. So rather than saying it's probably this to say,
00:13:05 - and I think this is the best possible explanation of something, their definition of what that is is actually different to what philosophers of science consider it to be. And it's a much thinner version. and so what they've tried to do, these, these technologists have said, here's my inductive based machine learning and it can do induction so well, that I can actually do some abductive reasoning now. But people like Larson and many others have pointed out that this is just fundamentally not possible according to at least this version of Western philosophy. The kind of decisions that you need
00:13:47 - And, the high value put on surprisingly unexpected is anathema to the way that these inductive based software machines work. So if you're only ever trained on what's come before, there'll be no strategic or military or tactical creativity from that AI commander that you hope to make, make, make decisions. And what we found in our discussions when, when thing on the paper was, so our, our criticisms of, of these, of this AI literature is the same, but just coming from different, sort
00:14:25 - So me having read Kitz all my academic career and Cameron coming from more a philosophy approach. so we found that that was effectively the same, a powerful argument. And, and there was, and this is where the kitch vision of war, part of the title comes from because a lot of the understanding of what war is and what it entails for command is and reflected in a lot of the AI optimist literature. And when you look at the nature of war and the kind of commands needed, the AI systems that we have just can't do that. They can't base the decisions on the unknown, even known unknowns, let alone unknown unknowns. 'cause there will be things nobody will have
00:15:06 - And what we end up with, in the real world then is, the, the major general of the HMS PNA force. So this, so I'll explain the, the title a bit now. So what you end up is with, a machine that can have all the facts at its disposal, at its disposal and know almost everything that I can know, but it'll be completely terrible or useless at making the right decisions or doing leadership duties. Has no human empathy, no human understanding, no concept of what strategy as opposed to knowledge is. So we'll end up with something, with a,
00:15:47 - that can have all the facts about obscure topics, but will not be able to make reliably good decisions at war because it has no understanding of what war really is. There are frankly wrong perceptions and understandings of what these technologies are and what they can and they can't do proliferating in a number of important communities. So obviously in the academic community, these are logically and empirically flawed arguments and perceptions of the AI technologies and what they can do, but also theoretically flawed approaches to what war is as well.

"Challenging Misconceptions: The Flawed Foundations of AI in Military Strategy and Policy"

00:16:30 - and understandings going around and in the academic community, which translates into the policy community as well, and also the wonk community as well. So the, advisors and experts in the national security defense and technology ecosystem, a lot of flawed understandings are flying around and you can't make good policy on invalid evidence, flawed logic and kitch theories of war. So that's sort of the fundamental sort of, so what we are trying to, correct that to try and show, this is where these arguments fall short
00:17:11 - fundamental nature of the technologies or the social and political phenomenon that they are engaging with. And an example could be that, and I've heard this in practitioner meetings I've had where they believe that military or security problems, even political ones, can be solved by trying to gain the whole system by quantifying everything, getting more data sets and more computing power. That's how you get, a machine that can decide, when to attack or retreat or when to, sue for peace versus antagonize, an enemy.
00:17:53 - that all factors can be known and digitized, put into binary ones and zeros in a way that computers can understand. When we are operating in a social and political world where there are no, you know, obvious right or wrongs, there's very rarely objective, qualities to the information and the knowledge and the activities that we have. So this means then that policy makers are, are possibly not getting the right advice, information needed when, acquisitions discussions come up and investments in research and development. So there are many companies and military bureaucracies pushing various
00:18:32 - that are making very grand claims about, we want to have an AI commander helping troops make, you know, difficult decisions when all it can do is present information in a certain way for better and worse. So the UK MOD has a project called Project Improbable, where it's very much is about trying to do the AI commander that the AI optimist literature says is just around the corner based on, well the, the flawed evidence that we present. another example could be, you know, palliatives artificial intelligence platform. Very grand claims about decision making capacities are being made and we would just, we are throwing skepticism on that based on argument and logic and evidence.
00:19:54 - machine learning slash artificial intelligence systems. And if we collectively as a national security community of academics and, and practitioners actually recognize that, then we might be able to understand what these technologies could be used for. Whereas at the moment, I think our sense is that people are dreaming very grand dreams about totally different kinds of technology that that don't exist. And at the moment, there's no technical development pathway that would actually lead us to, as a species, to having that technical capability.

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