Will Artificial General Intelligence Change the Nature of War?
Ares Simone Monzio Compagnoni - London, England, UK
Photo 142970768 / Artificial Intelligence © Ratpack2 | Dreamstime.com
To cite this article:
Compagnoni, Ares Simone Monzio, “Will Artificial General Intelligence Change the Nature of War?,” Military Strategy Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 4, spring 2023, pages 32-37.
Ares Simone Monzio Compagnoni is an architect and a UGVs analyst. He earned a MA in War Studies from King's College London and a MA in Architecture from the Polytechnic of Milan. He has worked extensively in architectural visualisation and is experienced in VR, real-time rendering, and computer vision programming.
Introduction
The idea of the immutability of the nature of war, as formulated by Clausewitz, is an article of faith that is constantly put to trial. The latest development in human history that can potentially change the nature of war is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In a recent article published in this magazine, Alloui-Cros argued that the nature of war will not change.
He based this conclusion on three points: AI is just a tool that compresses timeframes but is unable to make complex decisions, AI has human biases and is designed to solve human problems, and war is a human activity, and we will always have a choice to determine its course. Looking at the AIs that are currently available, he is probably correct and AI will not change what war is or break the trinity of passion, chance and policy that defines its nature. His conclusions are aligned with those of other scholars that discussed how military revolutions changed war. For example, Gray concluded that ‘some confused theorists would have us believe that war can change its nature’.[ii] Echevarria investigated the relation between RMA, globalisation, and the nature of war and concluded that, although it is changing, the Clausewitzian framework remains ‘more suitable for understanding the nature of war in today’s global environment than any of the alternatives’.[iii]
On one hand, Alloui-Cros’ article has merits because it recognized that Clausewitz’s theory of war is still the point of reference for any discussion and updated to AI past conclusions on the effects of technological revolutions on the nature of war.
On the other hand, he did not consider if an AI with human-like capabilities, so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), of whose capabilities far surpass human comprehension can falsify this theory. Vinge called this AI a ‘singularity’, a mathematical term used to label a point where a function degenerates and changes its nature becoming qualitatively different from what was before. Vinge concluded that ‘it is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules’.[iv] An AGI that far surpasses human capabilities is thus called a singularity because, once it appears, the past will not be a guide to forecast or understand the future. Some authors portrayed this possibility as the end of the world.[v] The implicit conclusion is that it is not worth studying what comes after because the AGI singularity will annihilate us. This position is disputable because if we have no way to know how this new reality will be, then it is impossible and equally useless to conclude that the singularity will destroy instead of saveing us. Furthermore, as Vinge argued in his seminal paper, as time passes, we should see the symptoms of the singularity advent.[vi] Hence it is worth studying how the nature of war will be altered by this new evolving reality. Alloui-Cros answered the question on AI and the nature of war for the reality we know. The purpose of this article is to add to this discussion by speculating what might happen to the nature of war when we approach the AGI singularity.
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/will-artificial-general-intelligence-change-the-nature-of-war/
