Artificial intelligence, also known as AI, is not an easy topic to write about. The technology is developing at a rapid pace in ways that lay audiences struggle to understand. Two new books ably take up the challenge. Scharre is a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and capable guide. He explains why AI matters and charts the areas that will determine which country gets the most out of its investments, focusing on data collection, computing power, talent, and the institutional structures able to harness AI technology to real-world applications, including those in military tactics and strategy. Artificial intelligence is now considered to be one of the most important areas of competition between the United States and China, one in which the United States currently has a lead. That advantage cannot be taken for granted; Scharre urges more cooperation among democracies and recommends export controls to limit Chinese technological development. In this respect, AI poses a test of two systems: the more chaotic and disaggregated U.S. model against the centralized Chinese model. The Chinese government wants to use AI to better engineer social control, and Scharre asks Western AI specialists to avoid becoming complicit in that project.
Jensen, Whyte, and Cuomo’s thought-provoking book is less about the promise of the military uses of AI and more about why that promise may not be realized. They argue that new technologies succeed when they fit into existing institutional structures and when they have advocates who can explain how they might make possible new forms of warfare. The authors’ analysis rests on full studies of information technologies that have been adopted unevenly by different countries and different military branches. For instance, the United Kingdom successfully deployed radar in time for World War II because it had the right mix of personalities and a clear strategic need for the technology; France and the United States did not. The construction in the 1950s of the semiautomatic ground environment network, or SAGE, to manage U.S. defenses against a bomber attack faced few institutional barriers. The studies on the revolution in military affairs of the 1990s and the development of the “Global Battle Network,” which combined intelligence sensors with armed remotely piloted aircraft, explore the mixed results of the experimentation of recent times, with the U.S. Army getting higher marks for innovation than the Marine Corps.
