Drones, AI, and Information Warfare

I have been thinking about this Twitter thread. It has been gnawing at the back of my mind all day. It is tied up with Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskin's book Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the Twenty-First Century (OUP, 2022). Thomas Rid's Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (FSG, 2020) colors my thinking, along with the reading I have been doing on AI all year. 

 What is emerging in Ukraine is a form of war based on the resources of Western militaries harnessed to the tactics of the underdog derived from the asymmetric warfare of the last few decades. The extreme importance of networks, cheap computing, and vast numbers of drones is striking. 

At the same time, we are witnessing the emergence and rapid evolution of so-called generative AI in the US and China. That keeps getting characterized in Cold War terms without too much thought being given to what that might mean. On the one hand, it means that, as with every information technology the PRC or the Soviets faced in earlier decades, it has to be tightly controlled. It has to be available for the state to manipulate the people but prevent the people from manipulating information in turn. The flip side is that AI will be used as a powerful driver of information warfare to manipulate the citizens of other countries. 

It also means the West will exercise comparatively less control (at least directly), which makes it more open to attack but also more open to novel uses and unexpected developments in AI. We need to recognize the military and intelligence complex is always deeply invested and involved in AI and all computing. We frankly would not have a lot of these techniques and technologies without DARPA and NSA. If the military and intelligence agencies can integrate these AI developments with the rapidly evolving techniques of warfare emerging in Ukraine, we should see further destabilization of our notions of warfare.

It is anything but certain that the American military can reorient itself that way in short order. It is also possible that anti-government groups in the US could reorient this way quickly and use the combination of AI, drones, and new tactics to try to create an environment they believe will allow them to triumph. 

We are already living in a world where our phones and watches are simultaneously devices intelligence agencies can use for real-time data collection and surveillance, the military can use for reconnaissance and targeting, and journalists and NGOs collecting information on war crimes can use for reporting. They also open us to constant propaganda and information warfare.

Something like this has been gestating in my mind for a few days. I am struggling to put together a coherent set of ideas, so, for now, it is just something I need to express so I can work out other ideas that may be more pertinent or that may constellate with it.