To prepare the armed forces for the “future battlefield” of 2028 or 2035, the U.S. Army is setting up shop at Carnegie Mellon University.
On Friday, the Army officially activated its new Artificial Intelligence Task Force at the National Robotics Engineering Center in Lawrenceville before a crowd of politicians and researchers from nearly a dozen universities.
The task force will become a national network of experts in academia and private industry, building out solutions that the Army can use not only on the battlefield but also in rescue missions and in protecting civilians.
CMU is the home base, but the task force will eventually include other partners.
“At the end of the day, I’d rather not fight a war,” said Mark Esper, secretary of the Army. “And so, if we can master AI … then I think it will just really position us better to make sure we protect the American people.”
He said during the Iraq war, many soldiers died on simple runs from Kuwait City to Baghdad on a daily basis.
“If I could have had fewer soldiers in vehicles and had a convoy led using artificial intelligence … think of all the lives that could have been saved,” he said.
General John Murray, Commander of the Army Futures Command, which is geared toward modernizing the military, said that in the near-term, he can imagine facial recognition technology could aid in combat.
Other areas of interest include technological advances in AI, robotics, and even hypersonic missiles that travel much faster than the speed of sound.
When adversaries have uniforms on, he said, it’s easy to tell who’s the enemy. When those enemies are dressed in plain street clothes, it’s much harder. With facial recognition, the military can become more precise in selecting targets.
Still, there are ethical considerations to keep in mind when designing technology that could ultimately disarm or kill.
When asked if the university had set up an ethics committee before partnering with the Army, CMU President Farnam Jahanian did not directly answer but offered that academia has a duty to use its knowledge for national defense.
“One of the important benefits of having this task force be based here is that it’s going to give us the ability to have discussions about AI and other emerging technologies and ethical applications of these technologies, both in a military context as well as a civilian context,” he said.
Mr. Jahanian was careful to note that faculty members are free to work on only the research that they feel drawn to; they are not told which applications to focus on. If they feel an ethical tug-of-war in their minds, they can opt not to participate.
CMU has a long history of contracting with the Department of Defense and many breakthrough technologies — including autonomous vehicles — have benefited from defense dollars.
Some of these advancements, Mr. Jahanian said, are not geared toward killing at all.
The university has created flexible robots that can maneuver through rubble and send a live feed to recovery specialists to aid in search and rescue missions. They’ve built statistical and data mining techniques to more accurately predict when military vehicles require maintenance, saving time and money. Machine learning and computer vision can even help diagnose and treat depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Financials between the Army and CMU were not disclosed, but Mr. Jahanian said funding from the Army will not only go to CMU but also to other partners that eventually sign on.
“Winning on the future battlefield requires us to act faster than our enemies while placing our troops and resources at a lower risk,” Mr. Esper said.
“Whoever gets there first will maintain a decisive edge on the battlefield for years to come.”
Courtney Linder: clinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1707. Twitter: @LinderPG.
First Published: February 1, 2019, 10:01 p.m.
