“Automation and artificial intelligence are one of the areas where the commercial developments I think dwarf the military investments in R&D.
They’re creating capabilities that can easily be picked up and applied for military purposes.” As one example, he asked, “When [ISIS] doesn’t have to put a person in that car and can just send it out on its own, that’s a problem for us, right?”
The information revolution continued, leading to more advanced computer processors and ever more sophisticated machine intelligence. And even while warfare in the information age might not have unfolded the way Pentagon futurists might have envisioned, the reality is information technology dramatically shaped how the United States fought its counterinsurgency wars. Information became the dominant driver of counternetwork operations as the United States sought to find insurgents hiding among civilians, like finding a needle in a stack of needles.
Sweeping technological changes like the industrial revolution or the information revolution unfold in stages over time, over the course of decades or generations. As they do, they inevitably have profound effects on warfare. Technologies like the internal-combustion engine that powered civilian automobiles and airplanes in the industrial revolution led to tanks and military aircraft. Tanks and airplanes, along with other industrial-age weaponry such as machine guns, profoundly changed World War I and World War II.
Work is steeped in military history and a student of Pentagon futurist Andy Marshall, who for decades ran DoD’s Office of Net Assessment and championed the idea that another revolution in warfare was unfolding today. Work understands the consequences of falling behind during periods of revolutionary change. Militaries can lose battles and even wars. Empires can fall, never to recover. In 1588, the mighty Spanish Armada was defeated by the British, who had more expertly exploited the revolutionary technology of the day: cannons. In the interwar period between World War I and World War II, Germany was more successful in capitalizing on innovations in aircraft, tanks, and radio technology and the result was the blitzkrieg—and the fall of France. The battlefield is an unforgiving environment. When new technologies upend old ways of fighting, militaries and nations don’t often get second chances to get it right.
If Work is right, and a revolution in warfare is under way driven in part by machine intelligence, then there is an imperative to invest heavily in AI, robotics, and automation. The consequences of falling behind could be disastrous for the United States. The industrial revolution led to machines that were stronger than humans, and the victors were those who best capitalized on that technology. Today’s information revolution is leading to machines that are smarter and faster than humans. Tomorrow’s victors will be those who best exploit AI.
Right now, AI systems can outperform humans in narrow tasks but still fall short of humans in general intelligence, which is why Work advocates human-machine teaming. Such teaming allows the best of both human and machine intelligence. AI systems can be used for specific, tailored tasks and for their advantages in speed while humans can understand the broader context and adapt to novel situations. There are limitations to this approach.
In situations where the advantages in speed are overwhelming, delegating authority entirely to the machine is preferable.
When it comes to lethal force, in a March 2016 interview, Work stated,
“We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision.”
He quickly caveated that statement a moment later, however, adding, “The only time we will . . . delegate a machine authority is in things that go faster than human reaction time, like cyber or electronic warfare.”
In other words, we won’t delegate lethal authority to a machine . . . unless we have to. In the same interview, Work said, “We might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.” How long before the tightening spiral of an ever- faster OODA loop forces that decision? Perhaps not long. A few weeks later in another interview, Work stated it was his belief that “within the next decade or decade and a half it’s going to become clear when and where we delegate authority to machines.” A principal concern of his was the fact that while in the United States we debate the “moral, political, legal, ethical”
issues surrounding lethal autonomous weapons, “our potential competitors may not.”
There was no question that if I was going to understand where the robotics revolution was heading, I needed to speak to Work. No single individual had more sway over the course of the U.S. military’s investments in autonomy than he did, both by virtue of his official position in the bureaucracy as well as his unofficial position as the chief thought-leader on autonomy. Work may not be an engineer writing the code for the next generation of robotic systems, but his influence was even broader and deeper. Through his public statements and internal policies, Work was shaping the course of DoD’s investments, big and small. He had championed the concept of human-machine teaming. How he framed the technology would influence what engineers across the defense enterprise chose to build. Work immediately agreed to an interview.