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What puzzles me is that as of yet, there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy, which seems like a MUCH more

What puzzles me is that as of yet, there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy, which seems like a MUCH more powerful application than this stuff. Sure, it can learn how to fly planes and drones, or drive tanks or terrifying robot dogs, but isn't the real potential here in duck-taping GPT-3 to a mountain of past battlefield data and specs and having it run war games for a while? Yes, I realize I'm almost literally describing SkyNet, but isn't that where the power would be, for better and worse? The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them, and current machine learning has magnified this ability several-fold. AIs have now repeatedly been dropped into all kinds of video games and gone from morons to competent to beating all human players and exploiting bugs no one even knew existed. In a grim sense war is just another game. It has constraints, resources, definable win and loss states, etc. Consider that conflicts have often tilted based on a single novel strategy discovered by limited human commanders, and then ponder what an AI that improves its Mario speedrun via nearly imperceptible collision glitches could do. Potentially, weapons don't matter as much as how well you can use them.

R0b0t1 6y ago
What if it already is? Do you have any reason to believe no one has been working towards this amazingly obvious eventuality? I suspect if a serious war started one side would just lose, almost as if by accident. I have no reason to believe this.
- fudged71 6y ago
  The british forces with Anduril drones and AI just won a battlefield simulation because they won on strategy.
hungryhobo 6y ago
I think both are important? Overall strategy and the ability to execute.
op03 6y ago
Cause the Taliban showed you dont need F16s and AI.
Frost1x 6y ago
Pretty sure the DoD is trying to use AI technology absolutely everywhere they can. All of these cases assume you have simulators that represent reality realistic enough that you can use AI approaches to find ideal solutions in the parameter spaces. Dog fights make sense since there's a lot of computational work done in the aviation industry and the environments are pretty stable, as I imagine constraints on aircrafts and pilots are probably pretty well known. Other cases may be a lot more messy to accurately model.
- CogitoCogito 6y ago
  > Pretty sure the DoD is trying to use AI technology absolutely everywhere they can. Exactly. This reminds me of the following quote: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." -Larry Teslar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect AI is used all over the place in the military, but we sort of ignore the boring AI used e.g. in logistics in most conversations.
noodlesUK 6y ago
Ethical questions aside: Probably because you’d end up with an AI that would do something that fulfilled its training criteria, but didn’t really reflect the real desired outcome, like that Tetris AI that just paused the game when it realised it was going to lose. Or the AI would suggest attacking unacceptable non-military targets, or inflict collateral damage, or suggest nuking the enemy as a first strike. AI might be an interesting tool for wargaming, but it’s never going to be a complete strategy guide. I’d say that AI is used extensively throughout the defence industry in specific areas though, and I’m fairly confident wargaming is one of them. But there are people who have context the AI will lack at all points in the chain. You wouldn’t just have some AI ordering troops about.
- skissane 6y ago
  > Or the AI would suggest attacking unacceptable non-military targets, or inflict collateral damage I would expect the people who wrote the AI would impose on it constraints to avoid this – to be useful in the real world, an AI has to comply with the same constraints that real world military commanders have to follow, and the laws of war are among those (certainly if we are talking about the US military.) (A realistic risk is that it might interpret those rules differently than a human would – maybe in an overly pedantic manner – and its overly pedantic readings of the rules might give human commanders cover or encouragement to engage in the same harmful pedantry.) > or suggest nuking the enemy as a first strike I doubt they'd even give an AI that option to consider. Realistically if you are a US military commander – in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or wherever the US might intervene next – that's not an option on the menu. The decision to use nuclear weapons only comes from the very top, and the very top will only consider it in utterly dire circumstances. To be actually a useful tool to military commanders, you want an AI which suggests to them strategies they might not have thought of, or which gives them a reasoned opinion on which of the various options they are considering is most advisable. A useful AI tells them how to use the resources they have, and nuclear weapons are not–in normal circumstances–an available resource to US military operations.
  - Teever 6y ago
    > I would expect the people who wrote the AI would impose on it constraints to avoid this The devil is in the details. What if the AI decides that the course of action that leads to the desired outcome of winning the conflict is to kill civilians but it is also aware that outright killing civilians is against the law or will be ignored by the decision making human so it instead decides to recommend a series of strikes that indirectly lead to a large famine which results in the death of the civilians and winning the conflict? Who is to blame there? Is this outcome desirable?
bartmika 6y ago
> What puzzles me is that as of yet, there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy, which seems like a MUCH more powerful application than this stuff. It'll probably be so effective, it'll still be fighting long after all of humanity has destroyed itself and left an irradiated environment. Here are two science fiction short videos of an artist depicting such a future: "LAST DAY OF WAR" - by Dima Fedotov | TheCGBros - https://youtu.be/IjJmTeBSEzU https://youtu.be/IjJmTeBSEzU "Fortress/Крепость" - by Dima Fedotof | TheCGBros - https://youtu.be/pyMNIFZTQkg https://youtu.be/pyMNIFZTQkg (edit: typofix)
- marton78 6y ago
  Holy shit, now that's a clear case of "awful taste, beautiful execution". How kitschy!
29athrowaway 6y ago
All-robotic armed forces are inevitable. Robots don't say no, they do not need indoctrination, they keep secrets, they are expendable, they don't receive benefits, it doesn't take 20 years to make 1 robotic soldier at a time, they're repairable. If a country decides not to go robotic, other countries will, and those countries will be in control.
- bartmika 6y ago
  "Security dilemma" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma
- ElFitz 6y ago
  Well, it shows that the modern moniker for soldiers is "operators". Weapons systems operators, transmissions operators,... The goal never was to have boots on the ground, but rather to have guns that shoot where you want them to, when you want them to. It just so happens that until now that required a fragile meatbag in fatigues & boots to pull the trigger.
timeforwinter 6y ago
> Sure, it can learn how to fly planes and drones, or drive tanks or terrifying robot dogs NB: self-driving cars, drones, and Boston Dynamics robots are all examples of systems that make significant use of hand-designed control algorithms. AFAIK none of those systems are doing (especially end-to-end) deep rl for control. I think the answer to your question might be something like "neural nets aren't as good as you think and have gotten a lot of credit for things they aren't used for and aren't even very good at."
tomrod 6y ago
https://www.nscai.gov/ https://www.nscai.gov/
- SEJeff 6y ago
  I’ve never seen this. Thanks!
- pupdogg 6y ago
  I've never heard of this either...and more interesting: Eric Schmidt, Chairman, NSCAI
lopatin 6y ago
AI is good enough to do some planning for you. Looks like we're just getting to the point where they can engage in dog fights. But there's a fine line. You don't want AIs replacing human generals, because generals need to make tough calls. So tough, that their decisions are still debated by us 100+ years after. War is the most sophisticated application of human intelligence. Dog-fighting F-16s are more like a self driving car in this sense, than a general intelligence capable of winning a war.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
Um, your soldiers don't die (as much). Probably the immediate overriding concern, since the military industrial complex is fundamentally restricted in America by a resistance to risk and lose American Soldiers. No soldiers to lose, no resistance to wars and use of weapons. Because we don't care about the rest of the world that we drop bombs on, that's for sure.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
I think that strategy is much more complex than tactics, while improving tactics has real tangible benefits that can be realized sooner, amplifying power. Even stupid genderals can win if their army is 10x as smart, 10x as powerful than the enemy.
freeflight 6y ago
That's very likely being worked on, but strategy is also in major parts shaped by often rather vaguely defined political agendas and goals. Ideally it also has to work in a grander geopolitical context, which is a lot of complexity to account for and simulate, involving a lot of very abstract and subjective calls. So it's probably a much more complicated problem than it might appear at first glance.
systemvoltage 6y ago
> The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them, and current machine learning has magnified this ability several-fold. That's what these F-16s are trying to do. It is taking visual and sensor information by the truckloads and find patterns in it, make meaningful conclusions from it and provide direction. Your definition of AI is too narrowly scoped. AI can be applied in planning, strategy, logistics, and things like flight mechanics, as well. This is precisely because AI today itself is narrowly focused. We don't have AGI obviously.
justatdotin 6y ago
to be fair, I struggle to recognise -any- kind of intelligence applied to planning and strategy, so..
DisjointedHunt 6y ago
War game simulators have been around longer than Neural nets gained prominence commercially. There are enough records on the drive itself about how the Military has funded multiple supercomputers and algorithms including popular videogame engines for this very purpose.
angry_octet 6y ago
"duct-taping" Yes, and no. If we break down by time horizon, this is the feasible limit: solving constraints and at-risk problems for operations planners; solving relaxed instances of future scenarios to provide guidance to mission planners given partially observed opponent behavior; and engagement level models. Only the last level is really something you can generate / extract training data for, and at vast effort. We've been modelling air combat for 40 years or more and it's still difficult for larger scenarios. We really have only a nascent concept of how to employ unmanned jets.
gnramires 6y ago
Let's be real: a full blown conflict (i.e. fight to opponent destruction assuming a Nash equilibrium of no early surrenders) between team A and C would probably mean complete destruction of both teams: look at what was achievable in terms of destruction in WW2, and imagine the result with 70 years of better technology, better bombs, etc. The Earth is too small and our weapons too powerful for playing child games anymore. So it doesn't really make sense to train an AI for full scale conflict, nuclear arsenals are already MAD-sufficient enough. Instead, you'd have to model complex geopolitical, even cultural and psychological details to model surrenders and which territories one could lose, for example. Essentially AGI-complete tasks. I know our realities are such that we can't let go of defense spending and defense systems yet, but it's looking increasingly ridiculous and dangerous to rely on military strength[1]. [1]: Instead of seeking ethical-economic-cultural multinational equilibrium, that is, a mutually acceptable plan toward individuals and development of our entire society/civilization. In the sense of each "nation" (non-trivial political subdivisions in general) tolerating the collective vision for development of our society. I don't think bombs are a very effective form of communication or cultural-philosophical exchange.
- mstipetic 6y ago
  One would hope
  - gnramires 6y ago
    I'm trying to be not only hopeful, but also active :)
- nindalf 6y ago
  Full blown conflicts aren’t the only types of conflicts. Small ones, especially those fought by proxies matter too. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict of 2020 wasn’t a world war, but it was still consequential. Notably it was won by the effective use of drones. Conflict will increasingly be drone based. The controllers of those drones will increasingly be wielded by AI. This link is about tactics. This thread got derailed into strategy. But it’s reasonable to think that AI would do a good job of controlling attack air/sea drones with clear success criteria.
Barrin92 6y ago
simply put because AI is way too stupid for that kind of stuff. When we talk about AI today most of what we talk about is actually just processing sensory input at a low level. Wargames and strategy require cognition and level of contextual awareness and understanding of human motivation and intent that falls well into the realm of sci-fi AGI. No military confrontation is generic enough to run on some ML pattern-matching or travelling salesman type algorithm. I mean just to talk about how low-level and limited AI is, when you take any modern learning system, you teach it Atari Breakout, if you adjust the panel by a bunch of pixels or rotate the screen you need to relearn or transfer-learn the game because the algorithm doesn't even understand the ontology of the game and really just manipulates pixels. Even Deepmind's starcaft bot was stupid in this sense. It didn't understand starcraft strategy at all (which was visible in it's nonsensical unit combinations it was building) but simply out-microed its opponent, it just had better mechanics.
- dwohnitmok 6y ago
  > Even Deepmind's starcaft bot was stupid in this sense. It didn't understand starcraft strategy at all (which was visible in it's nonsensical unit combinations it was building) but simply out-microed its opponent, it just had better mechanics. Protoss Alphastar was fantastic. It was definitely not just out-microing opponents (after later refinements Alphastar's micro limitations were very human-like), but really had an understanding of build orders, positioning, choke points and the like. Here's a great game it played against Serral (one of if not the top Zerg player in the world) where it holds fantastically against Serral's aggression and is able to use the layout of its own base to pick apart what looked like a winning position for Serral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6qmPNyKRGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6qmPNyKRGw
  - tornato7 6y ago
    As an avid StarCraft player I still think AlphaStar is one of the most impressive AI programs ever made. While it didn't get everything quite right, it exhibited planning and creativity in it's builds, and didn't just do the same exact thing every time; it scouted and reacted to the opponent's moves with professional-level proficiency.
Corinthian 6y ago
> "In a grim sense war is just another game." Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.
accurrent 6y ago
Theres also the question of experience. Where are you going to get the data for such experience. Keep in mind that GPT-3 takes A LOT of data to train.
webreac 6y ago
This AI would be the ancestor of Asimov psychohistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) . I am convinced that google is working on it. In trading, predictive models stop working when they are disclosed. If these AI are used, governments will keep it secret. Like massive surveillance, it will be confirmed in many years.
hntrader 6y ago
That's only currently possible to the extent that we can build a realistic simulator for the problem we are trying to solve, over which an RL model can learn a good state-action function. Which means that most real-world problems involving planning etc aren't currently amenable to AI/ML methods.
kolinko 6y ago
Modern AI wins at games where the rules are known (like go, or even Dota), but war irl is a game where you need to invent and adapt to a changing set of rules. As an example - if we had modern ai in ww2, it would help with the position of tanks and soldiers, but wouldn’t invent the idea of breaking Enigma, or the idea of making decoy tanks for the d-day.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Not just lack of out of the box thinking, also the inherent outdatedness of the corpus of documented war in general. There's even a saying describing the problem, "fighting the last war". Which basically means that human strategists are already more like GPT than they should. The problem is further compounded (beyond inherent outdatedness) by the general scarcity of the corpus, fortunately there just hasn't been that much war written by recent history.
- hugh-avherald 6y ago
  I'd wager it would have defeated the US in the Battle of Midway. And the position of tanks and soldiers is a gigantic part of warfare.
Someone 6y ago
How do you validate a strategic AI? You can’t trust it to be superior over humans because it beats humans in your simulator because, as you say, it may exploit bugs no one even knew existed, and some of those may not get recognized as bugs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation#Problems_of_simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation#Problems_o...: One notorious example was the US Air Force's Advanced Penetration Model, which due to a programming error made US bombers invulnerable to enemy air defences by inadvertently altering their latitude or longitude when checking their location for a missile impact. This had the effect of 'teleporting' the bomber, at the instant of impact, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, causing the missile to miss. Furthermore, this error went unnoticed for a number of years. Other unrealistic models have had battleships consistently steaming at seventy knots (twice their top speed), an entire tank army halted by a border police detachment, and attrition levels 50% higher than the numbers each force began with. If you can’t validate it, do you dare trust it above humans? With tactics, validation still is hard, but you can do (expensive) real-life experiments.
Hammershaft 6y ago
Besides other great replies, two problems that come to my layman mind are: 1: Having ai wargame it out ala deepzero would require modelling war accurately, which is a nigh impossible challenge in the first place. 2: Using past battles as data for generating tactics is useless as each successive generation of tech redefine the battlefield.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Protein-based war planning is based on rough models of how the battle of say defending motor rifle company vs a tank regiment goes, so nothing new here. A more fundamental challenge is about hunches the generals have about what they don't know due to always incomplete intelligence data.
- z3phyr 6y ago
  Studying logistics since at least the world war 2 can be useful as the means of warfare have not changed significantly since then.
goatinaboat 6y ago
there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy AI wrote the logistics plan for Gulf War 1 and more than paid for itself.
HPsquared 6y ago
It would be basically impossible to incorporate ALL relevant information into the system. Dogfighting has comparatively fewer inputs.
Strom 6y ago
> The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them AI actually gets into trouble due to the amount of data before humans do. Humans are quicker learners and only need a few iterations of analysis, while current AI needs a plethora of iterations over possible combinations. For example the OpenAI Dota 2 AI was doing pretty well, but it had to play a restricted version of the game where only about a dozen heroes are allowed out of ~120. Basically only 10% of the complexity. OpenAI never even attempted to compete at the full game before they quit and shut down the project.
- dash2 6y ago
  Did they quit because they couldn't win, or quit because they could easily win and it was not going to generate further insights?
  - cbruns 6y ago
    It was crushed by the worst pro team at the top tournament. I have never seen a deep learning bot (Alphastar included) beat humans in a game like this when reaction time/micro advantages are removed. Their novel 'strategy' is always optimized around perfect mechanics.
  - Strom 6y ago
    Well OpenAI holds the opinion that they could easily win. However I call bullshit. When a self-driving car company can have its AI drive around in an Arizona suburb, nobody sane believes that it means they can also drive around in Kolkata, India. However that is basically what happened with the Dota 2 AI effort by OpenAI. They managed to succeed in an extremely limited scenario and then proceeded to put out press releases claiming they had beat Dota 2.
codeduck 6y ago
> duck-taping GPT-3 to a mountain of past battlefield data and specs and having it run war games for a while This is a great way for optimising towards winning past conflicts. It is a terrible way to adapt to new developments. A very good example would be the mass employment of "cheap" drones in the recent Armenia / Azerbaijan conflict.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy AlphaStar: excuse me?? People write that these games have predefined rules, as opposed to real-life scenarios. Such people have probably never actually played Starcraft or any other similar games. Sure, the rules of how much damage each unit does, etc. - are fixed. (Actually not even they are fixed throughout the months, and a good player needs to be able to adapt to changes). But what the actual games end up being rarely depends on these rules directly. What happens instead is a meta-game that is created between you and your opponent where you have to read their strategy and come up with creative ways to deal with it. In fact in real life the situation is similar: the laws of physics are also always the same, the stats of airplanes are also the same for most of a given year, how much damage can it do, which angles of attack it can support, its speed etc. But it's the combination of these rules in real life situation that makes for the real meta-game. AlphaStar is absolutely an example of an AI that deals with this exact problem. PS. Sometimes I see how in the future when we create human-capable AI, these people will still say "but it's just statistics, it's not real intelligence, it's just advanced SVMs". Who cares about what the underlying primitives are? 2+2 does not equal 4 in complex systems like this, it's the emergent endogenous effects that produce all the bang. I don't care if it's all 1s and 0s, or some other small statistical primitive that you could reduce everything to: what's importan is the high-level computation and what it can achieve.
sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
I have some limited experience in naval war ship combat software. There are many systems on a ship that can be fully automatic and that was even true before AI was a thing. The Goalkeeper https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalkeeper https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalkeeper from the 80's is for example a fully automatic gun that can take out incoming attacks but also make strategic attacks. This system has to be turned on manually and a chief has to approve to the maximum capabilities such as the maximum amount of bullets the system is allowed to use. Other software already can give the operations team the advice to enable it without using fancy AI. But the command still has to travel by 3 people before it can be turned on. This is mostly because of safety. So I expect that the same will happen in other fields. A human probably has to get the advice from the machine and decide if an other machine is allowed to do a thing.
- baybal2 6y ago
  A battlefield superior "AI" can already be easily fielded. Just like Goalkeeper will beat any human operated gun, a cheap disposable drone swarm pointed at an enemy country with a program to blow up anything resembling an airfield will beat any military general at leading an air campaign, and will probably beat even a nuclear weapon in effectiveness. It's already possible without any real AI. It's just nobody bothered to make one (or probably did, and is keeping quiet about it.) It's just we did not have a big war in the age of powerful, disposable computers, and thus never weaponized it. There are many weapons today which claim to "beat nuclear weapons" in their respective context, with the main determinant of them being "super" weapons is the lack of humans in the loop. All of them can be developed, and weaponized, it's just a man with a gun, artillery, and amassed air, or armour already works superbly well at the task, and most importantly does so reasonably economically.
  - tim333 6y ago
    > cheap disposable drone swarm pointed at an enemy country with a program to blow up anything resembling an airfield I don't think that exists. We have cheap drones that won't do much to an airfield and don't have much range. We have B52s that can blow up an airfield but those aren't drones. Or cheap.
qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago
To my amusement that we need AI to plan for fighting instead of how to plan to all get along.
simion314 6y ago
How do you train it? You can build simulations and train it on that but then it would find some quirks in your simulations and exploit that or your simulation is too basic and won't model some variables that is relevant and a human can exploit. Then if you have the perfect simulation with all the rules and all the variables you should probably use computer science and find the best strategy and not some statistics/guessing/AI stuff that might find a good enough solution. I think you don't have enough real world data to train an AI, probably you could put the effort in building an AI to solve the economic and social problems, find better way to solve the issue where some guy spends on Fortnite skins the money that could feed an entire family... I would try to create a simulation for the economy, improving the lives of the poor around the world should reduce the political tensions and reduce the number of conflicts IMO.
richardw 6y ago
You normally have to have a lot of data to get a machine to deal with a situation. There’s a lot more data for flying than making leadership-level decisions. There are likely a lot more unique and fuzzy situations in leadership as well. I’d start off with something simpler, like predicting the markets and weather.
nonameiguess 6y ago
We are trying to do this, but GPT-N is not a productive avenue because you can't achieve what you're talking about by training on text. Single-vehicle control is a much simpler problem and thus you hear about it because there are successes to talk of, but an attempt at something like SkyNet is very much in the works, possibly for coordinating attacks though that isn't something I've ever worked on personally, but very much for automating the entirety of what the intelligence community calls the TCPED cycle. This is something my wife is working on, and the code name for the contract is actually "Cyberdyne." You're never going to hear anything about the details of how this works or whether or not it works at all because it only works if it's kept a secret.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ergot_vacation 6y ago
  This makes sense, and even as I was writing the initial comment I realized suggesting GPT was a bit lazy/imprecise, but it gets the general idea across quickly, and GPT HAS been remarkable good at things other than just completing stories or news articles. Realistically though yes, I'd expect it would be something geared from the ground up for navigating a game-like space, like, again, a very very souped up version of MarI/O. Something like speeding up TCPED seems like a much more modest and immediately doable goal; reminds me of efforts to automate financial analysis to some degree. Love the codename if it's actually genuine. And yes, obviously secrecy makes sense, but I'm not sure to what extent. Obviously the whole point of MAD was that it was loudly trumpeted as a deterrent. It doesn't seem impossible that the same might happen here. On the other hand, the military certainly has some ability to keep things quiet when they need to.
skynet-9000 6y ago
I watched a documentary about an attempt at this, and it almost started global thermonuclear war! Here's a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo
SavageBeast 6y ago
Came here looking for SkyNet reference - was not disappointed.
jjk166 6y ago
The people paying for these sorts of developments are the people who do that planning and strategy, and people are terrible at automating their own jobs. People presume tasks which they find simple will be easier to automate than tasks they find complex, and imagine a small number of skilled operators having their capabilities multiplied by systems that take care of the tedious labor. They see the ditch diggers being replaced by robots which the foreman can command. But the human brain is fantastic at estimating the size of a rock half buried in the ground, and terrible at keeping track of hundreds of workers' schedules. It's difficult to admit that what tends to make you a smart and valuable human is your ability to behave more like a computer. It's even more difficult to admit that the parts of your job you consider the most fulfilling and impressive can often be rendered unnecessary with minor process changes or ought to be done by someone else whose skills are more appropriate for those tasks.
Bjartr 6y ago
If the military has an strategizing AI that gives them an advantage, I'd expect it to be deeply classified.
greedo 6y ago
Planning and strategy are important, but logistics (which is a subset of planning) is generally more important. The US didn't defeat Iraq in GW1 by using superior technology; there was a point where Iraqi forces could have continued into Saudi Arabia and made things a fait accompli. What defeated Iraq was US logistics. We first inserted the 82nd Airborne as a speed bump, and in roughly 8 days we have F-15s from the 1st TFW, F-16s, AWACs, A-10s, F-117 etc etc deployed to Saudi Arabia. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.
mbrodersen 6y ago
Google “Aegis Combat System”.

R0b0t1 6y ago

What if it already is? Do you have any reason to believe no one has been working towards this amazingly obvious eventuality? I suspect if a serious war started one side would just lose, almost as if by accident. I have no reason to believe this.

fudged71 6y ago
The british forces with Anduril drones and AI just won a battlefield simulation because they won on strategy.

hungryhobo 6y ago

I think both are important? Overall strategy and the ability to execute.

op03 6y ago

Cause the Taliban showed you dont need F16s and AI.

Frost1x 6y ago

Pretty sure the DoD is trying to use AI technology absolutely everywhere they can. All of these cases assume you have simulators that represent reality realistic enough that you can use AI approaches to find ideal solutions in the parameter spaces. Dog fights make sense since there's a lot of computational work done in the aviation industry and the environments are pretty stable, as I imagine constraints on aircrafts and pilots are probably pretty well known. Other cases may be a lot more messy to accurately model.

CogitoCogito 6y ago
> Pretty sure the DoD is trying to use AI technology absolutely everywhere they can. Exactly. This reminds me of the following quote: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." -Larry Teslar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect AI is used all over the place in the military, but we sort of ignore the boring AI used e.g. in logistics in most conversations.

noodlesUK 6y ago

Ethical questions aside: Probably because you’d end up with an AI that would do something that fulfilled its training criteria, but didn’t really reflect the real desired outcome, like that Tetris AI that just paused the game when it realised it was going to lose. Or the AI would suggest attacking unacceptable non-military targets, or inflict collateral damage, or suggest nuking the enemy as a first strike. AI might be an interesting tool for wargaming, but it’s never going to be a complete strategy guide. I’d say that AI is used extensively throughout the defence industry in specific areas though, and I’m fairly confident wargaming is one of them. But there are people who have context the AI will lack at all points in the chain. You wouldn’t just have some AI ordering troops about.

skissane 6y ago
> Or the AI would suggest attacking unacceptable non-military targets, or inflict collateral damage I would expect the people who wrote the AI would impose on it constraints to avoid this – to be useful in the real world, an AI has to comply with the same constraints that real world military commanders have to follow, and the laws of war are among those (certainly if we are talking about the US military.) (A realistic risk is that it might interpret those rules differently than a human would – maybe in an overly pedantic manner – and its overly pedantic readings of the rules might give human commanders cover or encouragement to engage in the same harmful pedantry.) > or suggest nuking the enemy as a first strike I doubt they'd even give an AI that option to consider. Realistically if you are a US military commander – in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or wherever the US might intervene next – that's not an option on the menu. The decision to use nuclear weapons only comes from the very top, and the very top will only consider it in utterly dire circumstances. To be actually a useful tool to military commanders, you want an AI which suggests to them strategies they might not have thought of, or which gives them a reasoned opinion on which of the various options they are considering is most advisable. A useful AI tells them how to use the resources they have, and nuclear weapons are not–in normal circumstances–an available resource to US military operations.
- Teever 6y ago
  > I would expect the people who wrote the AI would impose on it constraints to avoid this The devil is in the details. What if the AI decides that the course of action that leads to the desired outcome of winning the conflict is to kill civilians but it is also aware that outright killing civilians is against the law or will be ignored by the decision making human so it instead decides to recommend a series of strikes that indirectly lead to a large famine which results in the death of the civilians and winning the conflict? Who is to blame there? Is this outcome desirable?

bartmika 6y ago

> What puzzles me is that as of yet, there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy, which seems like a MUCH more powerful application than this stuff. It'll probably be so effective, it'll still be fighting long after all of humanity has destroyed itself and left an irradiated environment. Here are two science fiction short videos of an artist depicting such a future: "LAST DAY OF WAR" - by Dima Fedotov | TheCGBros - https://youtu.be/IjJmTeBSEzU https://youtu.be/IjJmTeBSEzU "Fortress/Крепость" - by Dima Fedotof | TheCGBros - https://youtu.be/pyMNIFZTQkg https://youtu.be/pyMNIFZTQkg (edit: typofix)

marton78 6y ago
Holy shit, now that's a clear case of "awful taste, beautiful execution". How kitschy!

29athrowaway 6y ago

All-robotic armed forces are inevitable. Robots don't say no, they do not need indoctrination, they keep secrets, they are expendable, they don't receive benefits, it doesn't take 20 years to make 1 robotic soldier at a time, they're repairable. If a country decides not to go robotic, other countries will, and those countries will be in control.

bartmika 6y ago
"Security dilemma" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_dilemma
ElFitz 6y ago
Well, it shows that the modern moniker for soldiers is "operators". Weapons systems operators, transmissions operators,... The goal never was to have boots on the ground, but rather to have guns that shoot where you want them to, when you want them to. It just so happens that until now that required a fragile meatbag in fatigues & boots to pull the trigger.

timeforwinter 6y ago

> Sure, it can learn how to fly planes and drones, or drive tanks or terrifying robot dogs NB: self-driving cars, drones, and Boston Dynamics robots are all examples of systems that make significant use of hand-designed control algorithms. AFAIK none of those systems are doing (especially end-to-end) deep rl for control. I think the answer to your question might be something like "neural nets aren't as good as you think and have gotten a lot of credit for things they aren't used for and aren't even very good at."

tomrod 6y ago

https://www.nscai.gov/ https://www.nscai.gov/

SEJeff 6y ago
I’ve never seen this. Thanks!
pupdogg 6y ago
I've never heard of this either...and more interesting: Eric Schmidt, Chairman, NSCAI

lopatin 6y ago

AI is good enough to do some planning for you. Looks like we're just getting to the point where they can engage in dog fights. But there's a fine line. You don't want AIs replacing human generals, because generals need to make tough calls. So tough, that their decisions are still debated by us 100+ years after. War is the most sophisticated application of human intelligence. Dog-fighting F-16s are more like a self driving car in this sense, than a general intelligence capable of winning a war.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

Um, your soldiers don't die (as much). Probably the immediate overriding concern, since the military industrial complex is fundamentally restricted in America by a resistance to risk and lose American Soldiers. No soldiers to lose, no resistance to wars and use of weapons. Because we don't care about the rest of the world that we drop bombs on, that's for sure.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

I think that strategy is much more complex than tactics, while improving tactics has real tangible benefits that can be realized sooner, amplifying power. Even stupid genderals can win if their army is 10x as smart, 10x as powerful than the enemy.

freeflight 6y ago

That's very likely being worked on, but strategy is also in major parts shaped by often rather vaguely defined political agendas and goals. Ideally it also has to work in a grander geopolitical context, which is a lot of complexity to account for and simulate, involving a lot of very abstract and subjective calls. So it's probably a much more complicated problem than it might appear at first glance.

systemvoltage 6y ago

> The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them, and current machine learning has magnified this ability several-fold. That's what these F-16s are trying to do. It is taking visual and sensor information by the truckloads and find patterns in it, make meaningful conclusions from it and provide direction. Your definition of AI is too narrowly scoped. AI can be applied in planning, strategy, logistics, and things like flight mechanics, as well. This is precisely because AI today itself is narrowly focused. We don't have AGI obviously.

justatdotin 6y ago

to be fair, I struggle to recognise -any- kind of intelligence applied to planning and strategy, so..

DisjointedHunt 6y ago

War game simulators have been around longer than Neural nets gained prominence commercially. There are enough records on the drive itself about how the Military has funded multiple supercomputers and algorithms including popular videogame engines for this very purpose.

angry_octet 6y ago

"duct-taping" Yes, and no. If we break down by time horizon, this is the feasible limit: solving constraints and at-risk problems for operations planners; solving relaxed instances of future scenarios to provide guidance to mission planners given partially observed opponent behavior; and engagement level models. Only the last level is really something you can generate / extract training data for, and at vast effort. We've been modelling air combat for 40 years or more and it's still difficult for larger scenarios. We really have only a nascent concept of how to employ unmanned jets.

gnramires 6y ago

Let's be real: a full blown conflict (i.e. fight to opponent destruction assuming a Nash equilibrium of no early surrenders) between team A and C would probably mean complete destruction of both teams: look at what was achievable in terms of destruction in WW2, and imagine the result with 70 years of better technology, better bombs, etc. The Earth is too small and our weapons too powerful for playing child games anymore. So it doesn't really make sense to train an AI for full scale conflict, nuclear arsenals are already MAD-sufficient enough. Instead, you'd have to model complex geopolitical, even cultural and psychological details to model surrenders and which territories one could lose, for example. Essentially AGI-complete tasks. I know our realities are such that we can't let go of defense spending and defense systems yet, but it's looking increasingly ridiculous and dangerous to rely on military strength[1]. [1]: Instead of seeking ethical-economic-cultural multinational equilibrium, that is, a mutually acceptable plan toward individuals and development of our entire society/civilization. In the sense of each "nation" (non-trivial political subdivisions in general) tolerating the collective vision for development of our society. I don't think bombs are a very effective form of communication or cultural-philosophical exchange.

mstipetic 6y ago
One would hope
- gnramires 6y ago
  I'm trying to be not only hopeful, but also active :)
nindalf 6y ago
Full blown conflicts aren’t the only types of conflicts. Small ones, especially those fought by proxies matter too. The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict of 2020 wasn’t a world war, but it was still consequential. Notably it was won by the effective use of drones. Conflict will increasingly be drone based. The controllers of those drones will increasingly be wielded by AI. This link is about tactics. This thread got derailed into strategy. But it’s reasonable to think that AI would do a good job of controlling attack air/sea drones with clear success criteria.

Barrin92 6y ago

simply put because AI is way too stupid for that kind of stuff. When we talk about AI today most of what we talk about is actually just processing sensory input at a low level. Wargames and strategy require cognition and level of contextual awareness and understanding of human motivation and intent that falls well into the realm of sci-fi AGI. No military confrontation is generic enough to run on some ML pattern-matching or travelling salesman type algorithm. I mean just to talk about how low-level and limited AI is, when you take any modern learning system, you teach it Atari Breakout, if you adjust the panel by a bunch of pixels or rotate the screen you need to relearn or transfer-learn the game because the algorithm doesn't even understand the ontology of the game and really just manipulates pixels. Even Deepmind's starcaft bot was stupid in this sense. It didn't understand starcraft strategy at all (which was visible in it's nonsensical unit combinations it was building) but simply out-microed its opponent, it just had better mechanics.

dwohnitmok 6y ago
> Even Deepmind's starcaft bot was stupid in this sense. It didn't understand starcraft strategy at all (which was visible in it's nonsensical unit combinations it was building) but simply out-microed its opponent, it just had better mechanics. Protoss Alphastar was fantastic. It was definitely not just out-microing opponents (after later refinements Alphastar's micro limitations were very human-like), but really had an understanding of build orders, positioning, choke points and the like. Here's a great game it played against Serral (one of if not the top Zerg player in the world) where it holds fantastically against Serral's aggression and is able to use the layout of its own base to pick apart what looked like a winning position for Serral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6qmPNyKRGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6qmPNyKRGw
- tornato7 6y ago
  As an avid StarCraft player I still think AlphaStar is one of the most impressive AI programs ever made. While it didn't get everything quite right, it exhibited planning and creativity in it's builds, and didn't just do the same exact thing every time; it scouted and reacted to the opponent's moves with professional-level proficiency.

Corinthian 6y ago

> "In a grim sense war is just another game." Strange game, the only winning move is not to play.

accurrent 6y ago

Theres also the question of experience. Where are you going to get the data for such experience. Keep in mind that GPT-3 takes A LOT of data to train.

webreac 6y ago

This AI would be the ancestor of Asimov psychohistory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) . I am convinced that google is working on it. In trading, predictive models stop working when they are disclosed. If these AI are used, governments will keep it secret. Like massive surveillance, it will be confirmed in many years.

hntrader 6y ago

That's only currently possible to the extent that we can build a realistic simulator for the problem we are trying to solve, over which an RL model can learn a good state-action function. Which means that most real-world problems involving planning etc aren't currently amenable to AI/ML methods.

kolinko 6y ago

Modern AI wins at games where the rules are known (like go, or even Dota), but war irl is a game where you need to invent and adapt to a changing set of rules. As an example - if we had modern ai in ww2, it would help with the position of tanks and soldiers, but wouldn’t invent the idea of breaking Enigma, or the idea of making decoy tanks for the d-day.

usrusr 6y ago
Not just lack of out of the box thinking, also the inherent outdatedness of the corpus of documented war in general. There's even a saying describing the problem, "fighting the last war". Which basically means that human strategists are already more like GPT than they should. The problem is further compounded (beyond inherent outdatedness) by the general scarcity of the corpus, fortunately there just hasn't been that much war written by recent history.
hugh-avherald 6y ago
I'd wager it would have defeated the US in the Battle of Midway. And the position of tanks and soldiers is a gigantic part of warfare.

Someone 6y ago

How do you validate a strategic AI? You can’t trust it to be superior over humans because it beats humans in your simulator because, as you say, it may exploit bugs no one even knew existed, and some of those may not get recognized as bugs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation#Problems_of_simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_simulation#Problems_o...: One notorious example was the US Air Force's Advanced Penetration Model, which due to a programming error made US bombers invulnerable to enemy air defences by inadvertently altering their latitude or longitude when checking their location for a missile impact. This had the effect of 'teleporting' the bomber, at the instant of impact, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, causing the missile to miss. Furthermore, this error went unnoticed for a number of years. Other unrealistic models have had battleships consistently steaming at seventy knots (twice their top speed), an entire tank army halted by a border police detachment, and attrition levels 50% higher than the numbers each force began with. If you can’t validate it, do you dare trust it above humans? With tactics, validation still is hard, but you can do (expensive) real-life experiments.

Hammershaft 6y ago

Besides other great replies, two problems that come to my layman mind are: 1: Having ai wargame it out ala deepzero would require modelling war accurately, which is a nigh impossible challenge in the first place. 2: Using past battles as data for generating tactics is useless as each successive generation of tech redefine the battlefield.

jojobas 6y ago
Protein-based war planning is based on rough models of how the battle of say defending motor rifle company vs a tank regiment goes, so nothing new here. A more fundamental challenge is about hunches the generals have about what they don't know due to always incomplete intelligence data.
z3phyr 6y ago
Studying logistics since at least the world war 2 can be useful as the means of warfare have not changed significantly since then.

goatinaboat 6y ago

there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy AI wrote the logistics plan for Gulf War 1 and more than paid for itself.

HPsquared 6y ago

It would be basically impossible to incorporate ALL relevant information into the system. Dogfighting has comparatively fewer inputs.

Strom 6y ago

> The strength of computers has always been the ability to analyze literally incomprehensible (to humans) amounts of data and derive unique insights from them AI actually gets into trouble due to the amount of data before humans do. Humans are quicker learners and only need a few iterations of analysis, while current AI needs a plethora of iterations over possible combinations. For example the OpenAI Dota 2 AI was doing pretty well, but it had to play a restricted version of the game where only about a dozen heroes are allowed out of ~120. Basically only 10% of the complexity. OpenAI never even attempted to compete at the full game before they quit and shut down the project.

dash2 6y ago
Did they quit because they couldn't win, or quit because they could easily win and it was not going to generate further insights?
- cbruns 6y ago
  It was crushed by the worst pro team at the top tournament. I have never seen a deep learning bot (Alphastar included) beat humans in a game like this when reaction time/micro advantages are removed. Their novel 'strategy' is always optimized around perfect mechanics.
- Strom 6y ago
  Well OpenAI holds the opinion that they could easily win. However I call bullshit. When a self-driving car company can have its AI drive around in an Arizona suburb, nobody sane believes that it means they can also drive around in Kolkata, India. However that is basically what happened with the Dota 2 AI effort by OpenAI. They managed to succeed in an extremely limited scenario and then proceeded to put out press releases claiming they had beat Dota 2.

codeduck 6y ago

> duck-taping GPT-3 to a mountain of past battlefield data and specs and having it run war games for a while This is a great way for optimising towards winning past conflicts. It is a terrible way to adapt to new developments. A very good example would be the mass employment of "cheap" drones in the recent Armenia / Azerbaijan conflict.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

> there doesn't seem to be any talk of using "AI" (ie Neural Net stuff) for planning and strategy AlphaStar: excuse me?? People write that these games have predefined rules, as opposed to real-life scenarios. Such people have probably never actually played Starcraft or any other similar games. Sure, the rules of how much damage each unit does, etc. - are fixed. (Actually not even they are fixed throughout the months, and a good player needs to be able to adapt to changes). But what the actual games end up being rarely depends on these rules directly. What happens instead is a meta-game that is created between you and your opponent where you have to read their strategy and come up with creative ways to deal with it. In fact in real life the situation is similar: the laws of physics are also always the same, the stats of airplanes are also the same for most of a given year, how much damage can it do, which angles of attack it can support, its speed etc. But it's the combination of these rules in real life situation that makes for the real meta-game. AlphaStar is absolutely an example of an AI that deals with this exact problem. PS. Sometimes I see how in the future when we create human-capable AI, these people will still say "but it's just statistics, it's not real intelligence, it's just advanced SVMs". Who cares about what the underlying primitives are? 2+2 does not equal 4 in complex systems like this, it's the emergent endogenous effects that produce all the bang. I don't care if it's all 1s and 0s, or some other small statistical primitive that you could reduce everything to: what's importan is the high-level computation and what it can achieve.

sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago

I have some limited experience in naval war ship combat software. There are many systems on a ship that can be fully automatic and that was even true before AI was a thing. The Goalkeeper https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalkeeper https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goalkeeper from the 80's is for example a fully automatic gun that can take out incoming attacks but also make strategic attacks. This system has to be turned on manually and a chief has to approve to the maximum capabilities such as the maximum amount of bullets the system is allowed to use. Other software already can give the operations team the advice to enable it without using fancy AI. But the command still has to travel by 3 people before it can be turned on. This is mostly because of safety. So I expect that the same will happen in other fields. A human probably has to get the advice from the machine and decide if an other machine is allowed to do a thing.

baybal2 6y ago
A battlefield superior "AI" can already be easily fielded. Just like Goalkeeper will beat any human operated gun, a cheap disposable drone swarm pointed at an enemy country with a program to blow up anything resembling an airfield will beat any military general at leading an air campaign, and will probably beat even a nuclear weapon in effectiveness. It's already possible without any real AI. It's just nobody bothered to make one (or probably did, and is keeping quiet about it.) It's just we did not have a big war in the age of powerful, disposable computers, and thus never weaponized it. There are many weapons today which claim to "beat nuclear weapons" in their respective context, with the main determinant of them being "super" weapons is the lack of humans in the loop. All of them can be developed, and weaponized, it's just a man with a gun, artillery, and amassed air, or armour already works superbly well at the task, and most importantly does so reasonably economically.
- tim333 6y ago
  > cheap disposable drone swarm pointed at an enemy country with a program to blow up anything resembling an airfield I don't think that exists. We have cheap drones that won't do much to an airfield and don't have much range. We have B52s that can blow up an airfield but those aren't drones. Or cheap.

qrbLPHiKpiux 6y ago

To my amusement that we need AI to plan for fighting instead of how to plan to all get along.

simion314 6y ago

How do you train it? You can build simulations and train it on that but then it would find some quirks in your simulations and exploit that or your simulation is too basic and won't model some variables that is relevant and a human can exploit. Then if you have the perfect simulation with all the rules and all the variables you should probably use computer science and find the best strategy and not some statistics/guessing/AI stuff that might find a good enough solution. I think you don't have enough real world data to train an AI, probably you could put the effort in building an AI to solve the economic and social problems, find better way to solve the issue where some guy spends on Fortnite skins the money that could feed an entire family... I would try to create a simulation for the economy, improving the lives of the poor around the world should reduce the political tensions and reduce the number of conflicts IMO.

richardw 6y ago

You normally have to have a lot of data to get a machine to deal with a situation. There’s a lot more data for flying than making leadership-level decisions. There are likely a lot more unique and fuzzy situations in leadership as well. I’d start off with something simpler, like predicting the markets and weather.

nonameiguess 6y ago

We are trying to do this, but GPT-N is not a productive avenue because you can't achieve what you're talking about by training on text. Single-vehicle control is a much simpler problem and thus you hear about it because there are successes to talk of, but an attempt at something like SkyNet is very much in the works, possibly for coordinating attacks though that isn't something I've ever worked on personally, but very much for automating the entirety of what the intelligence community calls the TCPED cycle. This is something my wife is working on, and the code name for the contract is actually "Cyberdyne." You're never going to hear anything about the details of how this works or whether or not it works at all because it only works if it's kept a secret.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ergot_vacation 6y ago
This makes sense, and even as I was writing the initial comment I realized suggesting GPT was a bit lazy/imprecise, but it gets the general idea across quickly, and GPT HAS been remarkable good at things other than just completing stories or news articles. Realistically though yes, I'd expect it would be something geared from the ground up for navigating a game-like space, like, again, a very very souped up version of MarI/O. Something like speeding up TCPED seems like a much more modest and immediately doable goal; reminds me of efforts to automate financial analysis to some degree. Love the codename if it's actually genuine. And yes, obviously secrecy makes sense, but I'm not sure to what extent. Obviously the whole point of MAD was that it was loudly trumpeted as a deterrent. It doesn't seem impossible that the same might happen here. On the other hand, the military certainly has some ability to keep things quiet when they need to.

skynet-9000 6y ago

I watched a documentary about an attempt at this, and it almost started global thermonuclear war! Here's a clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHWjlCaIrQo

SavageBeast 6y ago

Came here looking for SkyNet reference - was not disappointed.

jjk166 6y ago

The people paying for these sorts of developments are the people who do that planning and strategy, and people are terrible at automating their own jobs. People presume tasks which they find simple will be easier to automate than tasks they find complex, and imagine a small number of skilled operators having their capabilities multiplied by systems that take care of the tedious labor. They see the ditch diggers being replaced by robots which the foreman can command. But the human brain is fantastic at estimating the size of a rock half buried in the ground, and terrible at keeping track of hundreds of workers' schedules. It's difficult to admit that what tends to make you a smart and valuable human is your ability to behave more like a computer. It's even more difficult to admit that the parts of your job you consider the most fulfilling and impressive can often be rendered unnecessary with minor process changes or ought to be done by someone else whose skills are more appropriate for those tasks.

Bjartr 6y ago

If the military has an strategizing AI that gives them an advantage, I'd expect it to be deeply classified.

greedo 6y ago

Planning and strategy are important, but logistics (which is a subset of planning) is generally more important. The US didn't defeat Iraq in GW1 by using superior technology; there was a point where Iraqi forces could have continued into Saudi Arabia and made things a fait accompli. What defeated Iraq was US logistics. We first inserted the 82nd Airborne as a speed bump, and in roughly 8 days we have F-15s from the 1st TFW, F-16s, AWACs, A-10s, F-117 etc etc deployed to Saudi Arabia. Amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.

mbrodersen 6y ago

Google “Aegis Combat System”.