A Survey of Military AI Technologies
Executive Summary
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely recognised for its transformative potential across sectors. In the case of defence, there are many concerns about autonomy, the risks that come with it, and the ethical concerns involved. However, governments and militaries worldwide are increasing investments in military AI technologies to stay as technologically advanced as possible and capitalise on the benefits of AI. This document explores the motivations behind the military adoption of AI, through an examination of areas where it has been deployed and an analysis of the transformative potential of AI.
The key takeaways of this paper are as follows:
AI in the military performs three broad functions: automation, prediction, and analytics. Each function is further characterised by the degree of human control, which determines how much or how little oversight there is.
AI’s utility for military purposes spans various areas- broadly divided into autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles, target identification systems and Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), decision support systems, battlefield healthcare, logistics and maintenance, and data analysis.
These different applications have already been implemented globally to varying degrees of sophistication.
Although AI is widely touted as having the potential to transform economies, several technological and operational barriers stand in its way. Once these technological barriers have been addressed, which in itself may take a couple of years, these operational issues need to be addressed through a combination of changing pre-existing systems and strengthening processes. As of now, the transformational impact of AI is hindered by the way current systems operate, as well as the fact that modifications need to be made to the technology itself as well as existing systems to utilise it more effectively.