The times of research and the times of the human mind

The risks involved in “machine learning” adopted for military purposes have been discussed at recent conferences. Hi-tech weapons that autonomously assess and autonomously respond to a threat are currently and rapidly being developed in military research laboratories. One wonders if political leaders fully comprehend the power of these new weapons.

The speed of research in laboratories is very different from that of the mind of the average individual, and most politicians have little or no real awareness of new scientific discoveries. When they visit the laboratories, they listen and nod but usually understand little, because it is not their field. They would need to be researchers of biology or electronics or physics to really understand.

So, they entrust decisions on “difficult” subjects to others. It has happened many times before. For example, during the First World War, the European political classes knew very little about technological developments in armaments. They left the decisions to their Armed Forces and the new weapons caused appalling carnage, leaving politicians deeply impressed.

The risk of hi-tech weapons starting a self-directed war today is low but technological development will increase their autonomous decision-making capacity. Electronics will mean that these systems are considered more reliable than a human being and microchips will decide when and how to cross the borderline of an attack, starting a war, deciding strategy, and giving orders; but silicon, transistors, and microcircuits, even if well designed, cannot compete with the abilities of the human brain, and will not be able to do so for a long time to come.

Everyone remembers Stanley Kubrick’s famous film Space Odyssey in which the HAL 9000 computer became the master of space station and astronaut life. However, leaving the imaginary world of films there are many real cases, often not known in which machines have taken over. One of the few known, and perhaps the best known, happened in September 1983: a catastrophe was avoided only by the intuition of the Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov. The warning of an American missile attack reported by the apparatus could not be true, so he did not sound the alarm, a very hard decision, not justified by his military rank.

Are today’s electronics capable of intuition? Neurochemistry does not even know what intuition is, and then there are many different intuitive abilities. Without the intuition of Stanislav Petrov there would have been the immediate Soviet reaction initiating a nuclear conflict. And probably none of us would be around to tell the story today.