NY.- When President Biden announced tough restrictions in October on the sale of more advanced computer chips to China, they were sold off in pieces as a way to give American industry a chance to restore its competitiveness.
Although in the Pentagon and the National Security Council there is a second agenda: arms control.
If the Chinese military can’t get the chips, the theory is that it would slow down the development of weapons through artificial intelligence.
That would give the White House, and the world, some time to figure out a way to lay down some rules for the use of artificial intelligence in sensors, missiles, and cyber weapons and finally guard against some of the nightmares that have been conjured up. by Hollywood — autonomous killer robots and computers blocking their human creators.
Currently, the fog of fear surrounding the popular ChatGPT chatbot and other generative AI software has made limiting chips to Beijing a temporary fix.
When Biden was at the meeting Thursday with tech executives who are trying to limit the risks of technology, his first comment was “what you are doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.”
That was something of a reflection, his national security advisers said, on recent classified information about the potential for new technology to radically change warfare, cyber conflict and — in more extreme cases — decision-making. decisions to use nuclear weapons.
However, even as Biden is issuing some warnings, Pentagon officials, who have spoken on tech forums, said they consider a six-month hiatus to develop next generations of ChatGPT and similar software a bad idea, since the Chinese are not going to wait and neither are the Russians.
“If we stop, guess who won’t: potential adversaries abroad. We have to move on,” John Sherman, the Pentagon’s chief of information, said Wednesday.
His candid statement highlighted the tension currently being felt throughout the defense community.
No one really knows what these new technologies are capable of when it comes to developing and controlling weapons, and they have no idea what kind of arms control regime, if any, might work.
