WASHINGTON — The U.S. military needs to rapidly adopt artificial intelligence technology to aid in tracking targets, data analysis and managing complex missions, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said Dec. 2 at the Reagan National Defense Forum.
Speaking on a panel at the annual forum in Simi Valley, California, Kendall touted AI as an essential technology needed to strengthen U.S. national defense capabilities.
Although AI has become an integral part of our today’s business across many industries, its use in military systems has raised concerns about unintended outcomes and escalation of an AI arms race.
Kendall argued that when associated with applications such as autonomous weapon systems, AI tends to garner negative connotations. But like other businesses that are leveraging AI to mine data, DoD wants to use AI to enhance human intelligence, to help understand the battlefield and empower human judgment through automating tasks like analyzing sensor data.
“These technologies cannot be stopped,” he said. “It’s being embedded into all of our products, it is being used where it provides a competitive advantage, and the government needs to not get in the way of that.”
The Air Force and the Space Force, Kendall added, need AI tools for data analysis, target recognition, sensor management and a whole host of tasks that currently overwhelm human operators.
Need to ‘gain confidence’
AI should not be viewed as a monolithic technology, he said. “Quite frankly, anybody who’s doing software for anything right now is calling it AI because that’s supposed to be the cool thing,” Kendall added.
As new applications emerge, he said, “we do need to find ways to evaluate this technology, become confident in it, have the ability to trust it, and to get it into fielded capabilities as quickly as we can.”
There are “enormous possibilities,” Kendall warned, “but it is not anywhere near general human…
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