“U.S. national security officials are warning about the
potential for the new technology to upend war, cyber conflict and — in the most
extreme case — the use of nuclear weapons.
WASHINGTON — When President Biden announced sharp
restrictions in October on selling the most advanced computer chips to China,
he sold it in part as a way of giving American industry a chance to restore its
competitiveness.
But at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, there
was a second agenda: arms control. If the Chinese military cannot get the
chips, the theory goes, it may slow its effort to develop weapons driven by
artificial intelligence. That would give the White House, and the world, time
to figure out some rules for the use of artificial intelligence in everything
from sensors, missiles and cyberweapons, and ultimately to guard against some
of the nightmares conjured by Hollywood — autonomous killer robots and
computers that lock out their human creators.
Now, the fog of fear surrounding the popular ChatGPT chatbot
and other generative A.I. software has made the limiting of chips to Beijing
look like just a temporary fix. When Mr. Biden dropped by a meeting in the
White House on Thursday of technology executives who are struggling with
limiting the risks of the technology, his first comment was “what you are doing
has enormous potential and enormous danger.”
It was a reflection, his national security aides say, of
recent classified briefings about the potential for the new technology to upend
war, cyber conflict and — in the most extreme case — decision-making on
employing nuclear weapons.
But even as Mr. Biden was issuing his warning, Pentagon
officials, speaking at technology forums, said they thought the idea of a
six-month pause in developing the next generations of ChatGPT and similar
software was a bad idea: The Chinese won’t wait, and neither will the Russians.
“If we stop, guess who’s not going to stop: potential
adversaries overseas,” the Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman,
said on Wednesday. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
His blunt statement underlined the tension felt throughout
the defense community today. No one really knows what these new technologies
are capable of when it comes to developing and controlling weapons, and they
have no idea what kind of arms control regime, if any, might work.
The foreboding is vague, but deeply worrisome. Could ChatGPT
empower bad actors who previously wouldn’t have easy access to destructive technology?
Could it speed up confrontations between superpowers, leaving little time for
diplomacy and negotiation?
“The industry isn’t stupid here, and you are already seeing
efforts to self-regulate,’’ said Eric Schmidt, the former Google chairman who
served as the inaugural chairman of the Defense Innovation Board from 2016 to
2020.
“So there’s a series of informal conversations now taking
place in the industry — all informal — about what would the rules of an A.I.
safety look like,” said Mr. Schmidt, who has written, with former secretary of
state Henry Kissinger, a series of articles and books about the potential of
artificial intelligence to upend geopolitics.
The preliminary effort to put guardrails into the system is
clear to anyone who has tested ChatGPT’s initial iterations. The bots will not
answer questions about how to harm someone with a brew of drugs, for example,
or how to blow up a dam or cripple nuclear centrifuges, all operations the
United States and other nations have engaged in without the benefit of
artificial intelligence tools.
But those blacklists of actions will only slow misuse of
these systems; few think they can completely stop such efforts. There is always
a hack to get around safety limits, as anyone who has tried to turn off the
urgent beeps on an automobile’s seatbelt warning system can attest.
Though the new software has popularized the issue, it is
hardly a new one for the Pentagon. The first rules on developing autonomous
weapons were published a decade ago. The Pentagon’s Joint Artificial
Intelligence Center was established five years ago to explore the use of
artificial intelligence in combat.
Some weapons already operate on autopilot. Patriot missiles,
which shoot down missiles or planes entering a protected airspace, have long
had an “automatic” mode. It enables them to fire without human intervention
when overwhelmed with incoming targets faster than a human could react.
But they are supposed to be supervised by humans who can
abort attacks if necessary.
The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear
scientist, was conducted by Israel’s Mossad using an autonomous machine gun,
mounted in a pickup truck, that was assisted by artificial intelligence —
though there appears to have been a high degree of remote control.
Russia said recently it has begun to manufacture — but has
not yet deployed — its undersea Poseidon nuclear torpedo. If it lives up to the
Russian hype, the weapon would be able to travel across an ocean autonomously,
evading existing missile defenses, to deliver a nuclear weapon days after it is
launched.
So far there are no treaties or international agreements
that deal with such autonomous weapons. In an era when arms control agreements
are being abandoned faster than they are being negotiated, there is little
prospect of such an accord. But the kind of challenges raised by ChatGPT and
its ilk are different, and in some ways more complicated.
In the military, A.I.-infused systems can speed up the tempo
of battlefield decisions to such a degree that they create entirely new risks
of accidental strikes, or decisions made on misleading or deliberately false
alerts of incoming attacks.
“A core problem with A.I. in the military and in national
security is how do you defend against attacks that are faster than human
decision-making,” Mr. Schmidt said. “And I think that issue is unresolved. In
other words, the missile is coming in so fast that there has to be an automatic
response. What happens if it’s a false signal?”
The Cold War was littered with stories of false warnings —
once because a training tape, meant to be used for practicing nuclear response,
was somehow put into the wrong system and set off an alert of a massive
incoming Soviet attack. (Good judgment led to everyone standing down.) Paul
Scharre, of the Center for a New American Security, noted in his 2018 book
“Army of None” that there were “at least 13 near use nuclear incidents from
1962 to 2002,” which “lends credence to the view that near miss incidents are
normal, if terrifying, conditions of nuclear weapons.”
For that reason, when tensions between the superpowers were
a lot lower than they are today, a series of presidents tried to negotiate
building more time into nuclear decision making on all sides, so that no one
rushed into conflict. But generative A.I. threatens to push countries in the
other direction, toward faster decision-making.
The good news is that the major powers are likely to be
careful — because they know what the response from an adversary would look
like. But so far there are no agreed-upon rules.
Anja Manuel, a former State Department official and now a
principal in the consulting group Rice, Hadley, Gates and Manuel, wrote
recently that even if China and Russia are not ready for arms control talks
about A.I., meetings on the topic would result in discussions of what uses of
A.I. are seen as “beyond the pale.”
Of course, even the Pentagon will worry about agreeing to
many limits.
“I fought very hard to get a policy that if you have
autonomous elements of weapons, you need a way of turning them off,” said Danny
Hillis, a famed computer scientist who was a pioneer in parallel computers that
were used for artificial intelligence. Mr. Hillis, who also served on the
Defense Innovation Board, said that the pushback came from Pentagon officials
who said “if we can turn them off, the enemy can turn them off, too.”
So the bigger risks may come from individual actors,
terrorists, ransomware groups or smaller nations with advanced cyber skills —
like North Korea — that learn how to clone a smaller, less constricted version
of ChatGPT. And they may find that the generative A.I. software is perfect for
speeding up cyberattacks and targeting disinformation.
Tom Burt, who leads trust and safety operations at
Microsoft, which is speeding ahead with using the new technology to revamp its
search engines, said at a recent forum at George Washington University that he
thought A.I. systems would help defenders detect anomalous behavior faster than
they would help attackers. Other experts disagree. But he said he feared it
could “supercharge” the spread of targeted disinformation.
All of this portends a whole new era of arms control.
Some experts say that since it would be impossible to stop
the spread of ChatGPT and similar software, the best hope is to limit the
specialty chips and other computing power needed to advance the technology.
That will doubtless be one of many different arms control formulas put forward
in the next few years, at a time that the major nuclear powers, at least, seem
uninterested in negotiating over old weapons, much less new ones."
Plan of action before lunch:
First – produce super computer chips,
Second – take over the world.
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