(NewsNation) — As Artificial Intelligence (AI) grows in popularity as a useful tool across the globe, the Pentagon is trying to keep up with the rapidly advancing aspects of AI, according to an exclusive report by Breaking Defense.
The Pentagon’s deputy CTO for critical technologies Maynard Holliday acknowledged the effort in an interview with Breaking Defense, saying the DoD is aware it’s behind on advancements.
The U.S. Military is looking to utilize AI to enhance the nation’s defense strategy. Still, it has hesitations that AI might not be safe or trustworthy, fearing that the technology may make decisions on its own instead of just informing those using it, according to a Fox News report.
Ensuring human control of AI is the Pentagon’s number one goal.
Holliday explained that if AI can be made reliable, it will have great potential to support military decisions.
“Missile defense and cybersecurity in particular are areas where threats can move too fast for humans to react in time,” Breaking Defense reported.
Holliday said they recognize that AI will be needed for fights in the future, to help plan and respond to future weapon systems and attacks.
“The weapon systems we’re going to be facing — hypersonics, directed energy, and cyber effects — are going to be moving faster than human decision-making, and so you’re going to have to be able to react at machine speed to be adequately defended,” Holliday told Breaking Defense.
But what exactly will the Pentagon use AI for?
Holliday told Breaking Defense that reliable AI would be used as a tool to help “policymakers and commanders understand a seething mass of ever-changing data, but actually generating potential courses of action — be that restructuring a troubled procurement contract or launching a particular missile at a priority target.”
Schuyler Moore, CENTCOM’s chief technology officer, said the military aims to use reliable and human-controlled AI to access massive amounts of data within seconds or minutes to help those in the decision seat come to an effective solution.
Moore spoke with Fox News, saying that “the military sees AI as a ‘light switch'” that will help their team understand the data that they receive and help point them in the right direction on how to proceed. She emphasized the importance of human control over AI and having a “human in the loop” to make final decisions.
“Help us make a better decision, don’t make the decision for us,” Moore told Fox News.
Fox News provided an example of this: AI could be used to crack down on shipments of illegal weapons around Iran. Moore explained that the military would be able to narrow down the number of suspicious shipments by understanding the “normal” shipment pattern by flagging irregular shipments, the report said.
AI would also have the ability to identify images quickly and interpret data faster, where it would normally take humans hours to analyze, Moore told Fox News.
“You can imagine thousands and thousands of hours of video feed or images that are being captured from an unmanned surface vessel that would normally take an analyst hours and hours and hours to go through,” Moore explained to Fox News. “And when you apply computer vision algorithms, suddenly you can drop that time down to 45 minutes.”
But according to the Fox News report, the fear is that some countries are getting “scarily good” at using the advanced technology for illegal surveillance, which has fueled the Pentagon’s desire to become aggressive in achieving its AI goals.
