Does The U.S. Military Need Skynet?

Carl De Groote and Chuck Louisell. C4ISRNet: Why the military needs Skynet

In October 1984, the movie “The Terminator” introduced us to Skynet, a futuristic artificial intelligence system that eventually became “self-aware” before turning on its creators and aiming to wipe out humanity. It is an overly sensational image of a future dominated by renegade intelligent machines.

In a more realistic future environment, artificial intelligence is distributed throughout the battlespace, collecting, curating, aggregating, fusing and routing information to create an ever-increasing advantage across various operations and sustainment scenarios for the military. Unlike Skynet, this distributed AI is underpinned by a delegation framework where humans are essential.

With this in mind, I’m reminded what Gen. Raymond Thomas, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said last December: “We need to embrace technology as a central essential weapon in our arsenal.” So how do we do that with an AI system?

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WNU Editor: That is the direction that the military is heading.