Eerie warnings from AI experts suggest that Artificial Intelligence could kick-start a nuclear war by 2040 that could destroy our civilization, and there may be nothing we can do about it.
A recent study by leading security experts believes how advanced in the field of Artificial Intelligence could lead to the creation of Doomsday Machines that could cause nations around the globe to take apocalyptic risks with their nuclear arsenals.
To understand what experts are talking about, let’s take a trip back to the Cold War.
Back then, a condition referred to as the mutually assured destruction (Mad)— a doctrine of military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender kept an uneasy peace between the superpowers.
Both sides possessing weapons of mass destruction had very little initiative to launch such a devastating attack as it would have been responded by an equally devastating retaliation.
However, the cold war is long gone, and we’ve entered a modern militaristic era where advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence no longer guarantees this.
Experts from the Rand Corporation—a nonprofit based organization with headquarters in Santa Monica, California—say that this scenario opens up a number of problems including the possibility of taking out an enemy’s ability to launch a counter-offensive, and there may be very little we can do about it.
The Rand Corporation offers research and analysis to the United States armed forces on global policy issues.
They say that given the numerous advances in the field of artificial intelligence, in the coming decades AI could practically cancel out Mad’s ability to keep nuclear tensions at ease.
The new study explains how futuristic AI agents, together with sensor and open source data could convince countries that their nuclear capabilities are at risk.
The report argues that this may cause countries to take more drastic measures to keep up with leading military countries such as the United States.
Speaking about this issue, Andrew Lohn, a co-author on the paper and associate engineer at Rand said: “Some experts fear that an increased reliance on artificial intelligence can lead to new types of catastrophic mistakes.”
“There may be pressure to use AI before it is technologically mature, or it may be susceptible to adversarial subversion. Therefore, maintaining strategic stability in coming decades may prove extremely difficult, and all nuclear powers must participate in the cultivation of institutions to help limit nuclear risk.”
But there could be an even greater threat lurking in the shadows say experts from the Rand Corporation: Military Commanders could make the wrong decision to launch an attack based on advice from Artificial Intelligence that has been fed erroneous information.
But in addition to the danger of being fed with corrupted information, AI is also at risk from hacking, which in turn opens the possibility that malicious third parties could trigger—just as those villains in Hollywood movies—a global conflict.
You can read more about the study on Rand’s website.
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