What is the Pentagon up to with A.I.?

Pentagon establishes Task Force Lima to study generative AI issues

Photo by Andres Gavino on Unsplash

Welcome Back!

This is a bit of a different kind of post. With China seen increasingly as threat of global war, the Pentagon is taking A.I. a lot more seriously. The US military is opening up to defence and weapons start-ups as evolving technology begins to transform modern warfare. Silicon Valley is only too happy to oblige, as National Defense is a lucrative sector customer to have.

Earlier in 2023, The Department of Defense (the DOD) updated its directive on autonomous weapons for the first time in a decade with AI ethics considerations and forecast wars to come.

Google funded Anthropic has been like Scale A.I., warning U.S. senators of A.I. powered weapons and how the U.S. should have them first. Dario Amodei, chief executive officer and cofounder of Anthropic, cited the need to reduce AI’s short-term risks of bias as well as longer-term risks to humanity.

More than a decade has passed since the Pentagon last updated its policy directive on these weapons, titled “Autonomy in Weapons Systems,” but that changed in the last week of January, 2023.

Fast forward to now in August, 2023, the U.S. Defense Department has created a task force to evaluate and guide the application of generative artificial intelligence for national security purposes, amid an explosion of public interest in the technology.

The Defense Department announced a task force to understand how it might use such tools safely, reveal situations where it’s unsafe for the department to use them, and explore how countries like China might use generative AI to harm the United States. Urged on by technologists, the Pentagon and U.S. Military now work hand in hand in quantum computing, and with A.I. startups on various experiments.

The task force, dubbed Task Force Lima, “will assess, synchronize, and employ generative artificial intelligence (AI) across the Department,” according to a draft press statement viewed by the National Defense media.

What I’m about to say should not be taken lightly. I have been following both emerging tech and national defense news for a while now and I see some concerning patterns.