Richard Danzig on technology roulette and the U.S. military
This report recognizes the imperatives that inspire the U.S. military’s pursuit of technological superiority over all potential adversaries. These pages emphasize, however, that superiority is not synonymous with security. Experience with nuclear weapons, aviation, and digital information systems should inform discussion about current efforts to control artificial intelligence (AI), synthetic biology, and autonomous systems. In this light, the most reasonable expectation is that the introduction of complex, opaque, novel, and interactive technologies will produce accidents, emergent effects, and sabotage. In sum, on a number of occasions and in a number of ways, the American national security establishment will lose control of what it creates.
A strong justification for our pursuit of technological superiority is that this superiority will enhance our deterrent power. But deterrence is a strategy for reducing attacks, not accidents; it discourages malevolence, not inadvertence. In fact, technological proliferation almost invariably closely follows technological innovation. Our risks from resulting growth in the number and complexity of interactions are amplified by the fact that proliferation places great destructive power in the hands of others whose safety priorities and standards are likely to be less ambitious and less well funded than ours.
Accordingly, progress toward our primary goal, superiority, should be expected to increase rather than reduce collateral risks of loss of control. This report contends that, unfortunately, we cannot reliably estimate the resulting risks. Worse, there are no apparent paths for eliminating them or even keeping them from increasing. The benefit of an often referenced recourse, keeping “humans in the loop” of operations involving new technologies, appears on inspection to be of little and declining benefit.
https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/technology-roulette
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