Greater adoption of artificial intelligence could act as a deterrent against adversaries in a future conflict in which access to communications and satellites could be denied, according to one senior Department of Defense leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gen. Raymond \u201cTony\u201d Thomas, the head of Special Operations Command, speaking at the annual GEOINT symposium April 24 in Tampa, Florida, offered his definition of AI as the point in which a machine\u2019s \u201csafe switch\u201d is off and the operator is no longer in the override mode, allowing a system to act of its own volition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTruthfully, I think we\u2019ve got to embrace that because it may be a necessity if our satellites aren\u2019t working or if our comms aren\u2019t working; your ultimate deterrent might be [that] I\u2019ve got this in lockup,\u201d Thomas said, acknowledging that allowing machines to execute certain tasks independent of human action might be Skynet-ish, but it\u2019s where the military has to go to maintain parity in degraded environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The military has to pursue these types of technologies because top competitors, such as China, \u201care not sitting ideally by in this stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas went on to outline an article from BBC that described how the Chinese were able to find and arrest a single individual in a stadium of 61,000 using closed-circuit TVs and the like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI\u2019m curious are they that advanced in facial recognition? Is that applicable for us in the future,\u201d he said, recognizing this level of surveillance isn\u2019t necessarily the American way of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMore of concern is where are they going to go as a totalitarian regime in terms of pushing that right into their military apparatus that would be more advanced than where we are potentially. We have got to compete there and not be considering the moment of whether machine learning is going to be something we\u2019re going to embrace.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The leader of SOCOM believes the military has to adopt AI to keep up with competitors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":32054,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":15,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[106,29,15,32],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3268],"class_list":["post-11118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-intel-geoint","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"SFAIBVU33NB7PEP3IBSFTSCVXA","arc_canonical_url":"\/intel-geoint\/2018\/04\/25\/heres-how-ai-can-act-as-a-deterrent-in-future-conflicts\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n