Robert H. Latiff’s Future Peace, a sequel to Future War, specifically brings to attention a subtle, yet potentially destructive effect of technologies such as autonomous systems, advanced weapons, and AI: the provocation to violence. Against the backdrop of the brewing power rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries, technology aggregates tension and catalyzes violence.

Future Peace touches upon the ethical, security-related, behavioral, and technical aspects of technology and warfare. It consists of four chapters: “A Giant Armed Nervous System” (referring to the military), “Urge to Violence,” “Stumbling into War,” and “Avoiding War.”

Latiff’s book comes as a warning to practice caution when adopting new weapons technology, and aids in understanding human and technical behaviors to attenuate its harms and decrease the chances of war. Not only does technology make war easier and speedier, hence enabling the rush to war, but hinders human reasoning. Such technical changes make the process of sound judgement difficult; for example, thinking and acting in a diplomatic manner. Furthermore, these changes enhance the potential for human error to get out of hand.

Latiff argues that it is vitally important to avoid entering conflict in the first place. He highlights the importance of the cooperative efforts of many segments of society, from the public and technologists to militarists and decision-makers. He implies that it is criminal negligence to leave everything to automation processes or politicians. Therefore, Future Peace also lays out long to short term recommendations to maintain peace and reverse the rush to war.

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utonomous features are not a matter of the future; they have been used in warfare for years. However, it is quite evident that with the advancement of technology and the weaponization of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems are swiftly adapting and becoming accepted.

As these changes emerge, the question that is often raised by international organizations such as the UN, which set the norms of conduct in an effort to control and regulate the use of autonomous weapons, is “How will human beings maintain control of the use of autonomous weapons?” In their study, Ingvild Bode and Hendrik Huelss flip the script to reveal another perspective of this dynamic.

Bode and Huelss aim to explain how testing, developing, and using weapons systems with autonomous features shapes ethical and legal norms, and how standards manifest and change in practice. The authors also examine the consequences of autonomous weapons for international relations.

Bode and Huelss acknowledge the fear and risks that these developments bring but adopt the approach that autonomous weapon systems may push people away from taking immediate decisions on the use of force as norms adapt to the appropriate use of force.

In short, Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Norms analyses the normative repercussions of weaponizing artificial intelligence by examining them not as tools used by the military but as shaping forces. Chapters include “Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Relations,” “New Technologies of Warfare: Emergence and Regulation,” “International Law, Norms, and Order,” “Norms in International Relations,” and “How Autonomous Weapons Systems Make Norms,” and contain assisting tables and figures.

As the trend and debate of autonomizing weapons systems continues, Autonomous Weapon Systems and International Norms equips the reader with an understanding of the relation of human-machine interaction and the process of integrating new technologies into war.

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n War Virtually, Roberto J. González takes the reader behind the scenes to expose how scientists, programmers, and engineers developed technologies that automate war, predict conflict, and regulate human thought and behavior. Does this sound utopian? Not so when you factor in the persistent drive to arm for virtual warfare. In this quest, data comes a valuable commodity.

González evaluates autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques. He examines the foundation of the latest version of warfare in order to explain how it has taken its current form through contemporary military operations and their high-tech and cultural underpinnings.

However, War Virtually transcends the design, innovative, and transformative aspects of technology and warfare, and touches upon human engineering. González reveals the relations between U.S. intelligence agencies and Big Tech, and its implications. It is no secret that algorithms construct behavioral models for anticipating or even predicting human behavior, and, therefore, all of us risk having our digital lives become part of the military-industrial economy.

Adopting a critical approach, González examines how the U.S. military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare, and questions the notion that technological advancements will lead to more efficient and less destructive warfare. In fact, he implies that such an aspiration comes at a great cost, and argues that in this world, there is little room for hubris.

War Virtually covers a large array of topics including automated battlefield robotics, social scientists’ involvement in experimental defense research, the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era, and the military’s use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict.

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n Proto-Algorithmic War, Stefka Hristova offers a unique perspective on the Iraq War and the history of algorithmic and digital logic that came to be a crucial element of today’s warfare. She examines the military policy of the United States going into the Iraq War: the U.S. approached the war with the logic of digital and emerging algorithmic technology alongside the preceding numerical logics of the British Mandate in Iraq. In a sense, the Iraq War became an experiment in the early stages of development and utilization of such technology in warfare, and moreover war culture.

Hristova provides a case study of a comparative historical framework reaching back to the quantification techniques harnessed during the era of Mandatory Iraq (1918-1932) and analyzes the parallels and diversions between the numerical logics in both cases.

The author further evaluates the logic that moved beyond the British mandate for Iraq and reduced culture, society, and the physical body and environment into visual data-driven, sterilized, reproducible warfare, highlighting that it lacked cultural and historical context. Indeed, the actual experience of the Iraq War resulted in massive-scale death and destruction.

Proto-Algorithmic War offers an insight into the digitization and automation of war. Hristova aptly scrutinizes the ways in which the Iraq War attempted and often failed to see and incorporate population and territory as digital and further proto-algorithmic entities.

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en Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie use fire as an analogy to showcase how AI has a dual nature: destructive and constructive. Just like our distant ancestors learning to operate their newly discovered, full of potential tool, our responsibility is to understand and use AI potential wisely. With AI revolutionizing the world, democracies have a responsibility to harness that power constructively and come out on top. Transformation is on its way—can humanity use AI to light the way? Or will the fire burn wildly and ignite a new type of war?

In The New Fire, Buchanan and Imbrie help us understand AI better by breaking it down into its “sparks,” which are data, algorithms, and computing power. They further explain the tangible and potentially destructive consequences of these sparks such as disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons.

On a larger scale, The New Fire shows the urgency of democracies to adapt to the powerful tool that is AI, as autocrats may use it for domestic centralized control and asymmetric advantages in combat. In that sense, they argue that harnessing the power of AI is crucial for holding democracy in balance in the world. The New Fire also acknowledges that democracies have a harder time adapting to the age of AI given ethical and civil concerns, but that new ways could be forged based on the advantages of democracy.

Drawing on examples from geopolitical competition and its analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy while respecting civil rights. In the age of AI, this crucial topic may determine the choice of course between war and peace.

Written by Dilara Özer

For the fifth year in a row, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence issued the “AI Index” to measure the “contemporary trends of AI” as an independent initiative led by the AI Index Steering Committee, a multidisciplinary group consisting of a variety of experts from diverse academic and industry backgrounds. The value of the AI Index is derived from insights gained from data analysis on a large scale.

The index makes use of data inputs, and processes them into useful insights reported in the form of meaningful figures and graphs. The insights gained from the data analysis serve as a reference that enables stakeholders and decision-makers to make informed decisions regarding the use and development of AI in a way that benefits mankind.

The AI Index also provides relevant researchers and practitioners with a trackable and quantifiable key performance indicator (KPI) that can be referenced in future studies and points to the trends of AI investments. That is why the index is credible and reliable for active stakeholders and practitioners in the study or development of AI.

This year’s AI Index, released in 2022, sheds light on major developments in the AI industry between 2020 and 2021, and the findings are truly remarkable. They include a variety of themes and focuses on somewhat controversial, yet important subjects, covering both the theoretical and practical aspects of AI and its effects on different sectors like education, governance, policymaking, and economy.

It is worth mentioning that this year’s findings are still being debated and are expected to be the subject of further study in the coming years. AI technologies are witnessing a golden era and are trending in global markets. There is, however, a gap between the risks for companies of using AI technologies, and the attempts to mitigate the risks for the sake of the benefit of humanity.

The AI report shows several major developments in the field based on data collected by primary research. Below is a brief summary of the findings per sector.

The development of master language models and multimedia applications accelerated as a result of superior technical criteria. Despite the major developments in AI, ethical concerns continued to arise as some texts generated by the models were classified as “toxic” or biased when it came to social, economic, and racial backgrounds.

Liz Rykert, President at Meta Strategies, a consultancy that works with technology and complex organizational change, noted that “The key for networked AI will be the ability to diffuse equitable responses to basic care and data collection. If bias remains in the programming it will be a big problem. I believe we will be able to develop systems that will learn from and reflect a much broader and more diverse population than the systems we have now.”

The efforts to deal with such ethical concerns were not sufficient as mentioned in the report findings. There are major labs and AI companies that claim that they have progressed towards eliminating relevant ethical concerns like OpenAI and others. Nonetheless, the AI Index 2022 report findings indicate that there is still a long way to go when it comes to dealing with the ethical concerns arising from the further development and use of AI technologies.

The economic dimension of AI

The 2022 AI Index report indicated that AI was substantially and directly integrated with economic activities. The impact of AI on economic performance has spread globally through research, publishing, and funding opportunities. There has been a major increase in the percentage of AI investments (which doubled in 2021 compared to 2020).

In 2020, there were only four funding rounds for AI-related projects. In 2021, however, there were 15 rounds of funding with an increased rate where the companies that specialize in data management, processing, and cloud services received the highest amount of funding followed by medical institutions and financial technology (fintech) companies.

The 2022 AI report also found a decrease in the average price of AI-based/robotic weapons, a drop-down of 46.2% in the past five years. This is mainly due to the ethical concerns surrounding AI-based weaponry as there are still not enough policies, laws, or clear guidelines that regulate the use of AI-integrated weapons.

The main concern arises from the ease of procuring AI-based weapons and using them in a way that endangers the people’s lives, especially societies’ marginalized sectors AI technologies have been shown to be biased, particularly against women and minority communities. False identifications disproportionately impact already marginalized and racialized groups.

The research dimension of AI

The United States of America and the Republic of China, alongside other countries, have exerted much effort in researching and publishing on AI-related topics. This, however, gives the U.S. and China an unfair advantage when it comes to dictating the trends and direction of AI-related research and practices, as both countries steer the research in a way that suits their policies and benefits their interests.

With the U.S. and China leading AI-related research, many developing countries are left behind as they lack the opportunity to participate in the policymaking and the setting of AI regulations. Instead, third-world countries are limited to the consumption of AI technologies, which contributes to creating negative stereotypes and biases against them.

The legal dimension of AI

The AI 2021 report uses the U.S. as an example for the increasing number of laws and policies that ought to regulate the practice and use of AI technologies. The U.S. law enforcement agencies and policymakers suggested 130 laws related to the use of AI in different fields, proposed to be passed in 2021. The year 2021 indeed witnessed a major focus on proposing laws and policies to regulate the use of AI-related technologies as compared to previous years—only one law was passed regarding the use of AI technologies in 2015.