Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles

> The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ...

Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it?

Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. But AI is much less strongly dependent on those things: You don't need lots of people; the robots and computers do much of the fighting. And wealth only helps so much: For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. As we know well, spending more on software development doesn't always yield a better outcome. What's the benefit from spending $100 billion on development rather than $1 billion or even $10 million? For a lot of software, not much. (Hardware scale does help machine learning, but is there an upper limit or diminishing returns?)

Small countries might have an enormous opportunity. Could Singapore or Israel take the lead in AI and become major military powers? Could Saudi Arabia or Iran afford to develop AI as good as the U.S., China, or Russia? What about private companies or individuals? I suspect it depends not on quantity of developers, but on quantity of 10x developers and on who first discovers the superior technology and, more importantly, its application. Remember that in WWII, German tanks were inferior to many of their enemies, but the Germans figured out how to use tanks more effectively and seized an enormous advantage before their enemies could catch up.

EDIT: A couple clarifications and added the potential of private organizations

There's just a handful of Ohio class subs and all of them should have been replaced by more modern and stealthier designs by now. It's conceivable that an enemy could locate most of them and hit them with nuclear torpedos or similar.

And even if most of the active subs survived it might not be sufficient to ensure MAD because they don't carry all that many SLBMs.

It makes me bristle every time I read it. Advanced statistical computing != thinking! People love to conflate number crunching with intuition and all of the other things that are impossible for computers to do, so I expect it to continue.

I disagree with both assertions. Unless any major breakthroughs in AI come along, you need a lot of people to create light, sweet crude data. China has multiples of the U.S. population, and is an expansive surveillance state gathering up every bit the internet has to offer, in contrast to the increasingly privacy-sensitive West. Given current trends in deep learning, those two factors alone give China an enormous advantage over the U.S.

Likewise, arguing that AI/software can supplant wealth in warfare is laughable. An example could be 9/11. The total cost to Al-Qaeda was a rounding error compared to the trillions spent in Afghanistan (and later, Iraq). And I have read anecdotes of U.S. Marines in Iraq recalling how insurgents managed to waste millions (if not billions) by firing one rocket at a Marine base then fleeing, all while the entire base has to shut down operations to dig in and defend, even if the lone attacker is long gone by the time anybody’s in position. And yet neither Al-Qaeda or ISIS or even the United States itself has managed to fully and definitely declare peace and go home without a new insurgency rising up in their wake.

In short, a power with little relative wealth or population - even with sophisticated software and AI - could never be any more than an expensive nuisance to the larger powers.

you are misinformed.