AI Warfare: No Going Back

AI warfare is here to stay. At the inception of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of computing, we can only speculate how things will go both geopolitically and for humanity as a whole.

The U.S. seeks to develop AI-enabled swarming drones for counter A2AD operations.

On Friday, November 27, 2020, Iran’s top nuclear physicist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, drove with his wife from his holiday home on Iran’s Caspian coast to his country house in Absard, near Tehran. Although Iranian authorities warned him to avoid travel due to security issues, Fakhrizadeh insisted on traveling to the capital for an important meeting and to deliver a lecture to his students at Iman Hussein University. The rural road on which he drove his armored Nissan Teana, accompanied by three other armored vehicles, was less busy than usual due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Suddenly, a shot rang out from a pickup truck on the other side of the road. Not recognizing the gunfire and perhaps thinking he had struck something, Fakhrizadeh stopped and stepped out of the vehicle. Then came additional shots, hitting Fakhrizadeh thirteen times and killing him along with a bodyguard who attempted to intervene. Then, the pickup truck exploded. The entire attack, widely believed to have been perpetrated by Israel, occurred in less than three minutes. What’s more, the gun used in the attack was operated entirely remotely via satellite while using artificial intelligence (AI) facial recognition to target the victim specifically. It was one of the world’s first glimpses into the growing trend of harnessing AI for military purposes.

Militaries worldwide are adopting AI technologies to meet the battlefield needs of the future. In this article, we explore what AI technologies are in use or near development today and the possible future of AI-based warfare systems in a post-microchip world.