A conversation with Paul Scharre, author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, who joins us to talk about

how AI’s superhuman command and control abilities will change the battlefield
why offense/defense balance isn’t a well-defined concept
“race to the bottom” dynamics for autonomous weapons
how a US/taiwan conlict in the age of drones might play out
and more…

Links mentioned: Gradual Disempowerment, Swarms over the Strait

Transcript

Rai Sur 00:00:36

Today we’re speaking with Paul Scharre. Paul is the Executive Vice President at the Center for a New American Security and the author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He also formerly worked at the Pentagon on emerging technologies. Welcome, Paul.

Paul Scharre 00:00:52

Thanks for having me.

Rai Sur 00:00:53

We’re also joined by Sentinel forecaster and co-founder Nuno Sempere, Sentinel Superforecaster Lisa, and Superforecaster Scott Eastman, whose specialty is in geopolitics, epidemiology, and AI. Welcome, Scott.

Paul, what is command and control, and how do you see AI significantly altering it?

Paul Scharre 00:01:18

The term command and control is used by militaries to describe the internal organizational and informational processes used to organize military forces and coordinate their behavior. Militaries work in a very hierarchical format, with teams, squads, platoons, companies, and battalions. The way they communicate has evolved from signal flags on the battlefield to radio communications, to today’s use of computers.

Improvements in command and control can yield dramatic improvements on the battlefield, even if the military forces themselves are the same. We often think about the physical hardware of drones, missiles, or robots, and that’s absolutely valuable. But there are also potentially transformative effects in command and control.

If a military can gather more information about the battlefield, make sense of it faster than the adversary, make better decisions, and execute those decisions in a coordinated fashion, it can have dramatic effects. This is particularly true if they can change the battlespace faster than the adversary can react, leaving the adversary constantly trying to respond to what happened six hours ago.

Nuño Sempere 00:03:04

What’s a concrete example of this?

Paul Scharre 00:03:11

During the US advance into Iraq in 2003, US military forces ...

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