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BOOK REVIEW: The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI

By Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie / MIT Press

Reviewed by James Voorhees

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Both Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie are senior fellows at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Both have served in government. Buchanan recently served on the staff of the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House; Imbrie is currently a Senior Advisor in the State Department.  Both are well qualified to examine what AI means for national security and for geopolitics more generally.

In the heart of the book, they look at cybersecurity, the spread of disinformation, and lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). They also examine how government and the private sector have worked together to use AI both in times of war and times of peace.

Two themes run throughout the book. The first is the question of whether autocracies are better able to harness AI than democracies. The second is examing whether China has an advantage over the West when it comes to AI? ...

Many evangelists, they find, have an anti-military, anti-national security bias. Google found this out after they began work with DoD on Project Maven. Other firms have also hesitated to work with the Pentagon for similar reasons. The Chinese Communist Party, in contrast, can compel any company to work with the state.  ...

In their discussion on cybersecurity, the authors linger on the offensive side. They show what attackers can do using AI, which is formidable. It can be used to find the vulnerabilities to attack, automate attacks, and deceive defenders. It can attack machine learning itself. ...

The technology improvements that are making deep fakes look even more real only promise to make the problems worse. Solutions are not obvious. ...

See the full story here: https://www.thecipherbrief.com/column_article/the-future-of-artificial-intelligence