AI For The Rest of Us: Understanding the Technology That’s Shaping Our World

In a world of cheap, ubiquitous sensors and global data-collection, the fog of war will proliferate throughout the battlespace, not as a fog that settles through sparseness, but more like the mist the rises from the waterfall. It is the torrent that creates the fog. The crushing river of data will make it hard to see and hard to know. The promise of AI in war is that it will help commanders to aggregate data; to derive insights from inputs; and make sense from the sensors. But this is possible only if we implement AI wisely. As you will see in this book and throughout the history of deep neural networks, machine learning unwisely implemented can lead us to overconfidence and unintended consequences. AI is not a solution to this fog of war problem—it is only a potential solution. Whether we can actualize it depends on the prudence with which we employ it.