Artificial Intelligence Marches To The Battlefield

A technological revolution is underway, as artificial intelligence (AI) appears set to revamp work, society and global economies. Like the computer and internet revolutions that preceded it, AI will also influence militaries and the use of armed force.

The idea of artificial intelligence is nothing new. Technological advances over the last two decades, however, have brought it closer to reality. The term refers to advanced technologies that enable machines to gain intelligence and prediction capabilities. These are generally developed by experience or through data provided to the machine.

There are two major aspects of AI: Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL). Machine learning is the ability of computers to learn from data without being explicitly programmed. Where traditional programming involves a programmer writing rules that define how a program should work on a computer or machine, in ML the machine learns the rules from data rather than an explicit program. A human must still write the code that produces the ML model. For it to qualify as ML, a model must learn from data rather than memorizing it.

DL involves training deep neural networks, or artificial neural networks, developed to operate like the human brain. Such a network is created by stacking several artificial neurons (perceptrons) together. DL involves training a neural network with several hidden layers. At least two hidden neural layers are needed to create a deep neural network. These networks can learn complex relationships in data but require large amounts of information and time to train.

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