Artificial intelligence will give the United States, its allies and its partners advantages that will expedite and better inform decision-making on the battlefield, reducing the risk of casualties and collateral damage, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center said.
At the Atlantic Festival’s “Military Readiness in the Age of AI” event in Washington today, Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said that within the next year or two, artificial intelligence will begin to be employed in warfighting operations.
Currently, he said, AI is used in a fairly limited way in military applications such as perception, natural language processing and expert systems such as predictive maintenance to bring AI into lower-cost missions that don’t have major consequences to warfighters.
As proof of concept and confidence is gained in using AI, the general said, it will be adopted at scale, though he acknowledged reluctance to name which combat systems would be enabled first due to the algorithms and other adoptive variables involved.