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Writing in The House last week, Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East Tobias Ellwood said:

“When an AI-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle ‘killed’ its human handler in a simulated test, eliminating the operator for daring to interfere with its mission objectives, we should worry.

“But when security minister Tom Tugendhat (a rare round peg in a round hole) warns us that AI is moving too fast for even the ‘finest clerks’ in Parliament to regulate – Westminster, we have a problem.”

Related: Is AI the end of the world or the beginning of something new? and The attack on freedom of speech and freedom of thought to forcibly shape society continues

We have less than two years before AI becomes a security problem we can no longer control, Mr. Ellwood said. AI is the ultimate force multiplier with a capacity to totally reshape the rules of war.

Machine learning and autonomy is about to alter the battlefield existentially and whoever gets there first will have a critical advantage.

War fighting is about lethality – how and when individual military components are orchestrated to maximise concentration of force to overcome an adversary. In removing the human from both operating those components and the decision-making process, efficiency will jump exponentially.

AI will remove the “fog of war”. Masses of data regarding enemy strengths, weaknesses, and intensions in contrast to individual dispositions will be assessed instantly. Hesitance, human error, and misguided heroism will all be removed from command and control. Utilising swarm unmanned systems will allow for instantaneous smart “sacrifices” to be calculated, the timing of which could be time critical in winning a battle.

If we outsource decision making to a machine capable of learning as it fights, then vital hours will be saved as confirmatory orders are no longer passed up and down the chain of command.

Even in the grey zone, large scale disinformation could be actively propagated across the internet far more efficiently. AI can instantly monitor and adjust its messaging to maximise political discord, even to the point where targeted communities would struggle to know what is true anymore.

AI is a Pandora’s box that will completely reshape the rules of war, The House, Tobias Ellwood MP, 21 June 2023

What happens if private corporations and governments designing and controlling AI use it, not for wars between nations or to defend innocent citizens, but instead against defenceless citizens to advance a global agenda? 

We agree with Mr. Ellwood when he said: “by any measure our world is becoming more dangerous not less” – although possibly not entirely for the same reasons.  As for the drones, perhaps it is time for citizens to become handy with a slingshot.