July 20, 2024
How AI is changing warfare
It is unclear whether the PLA has the tech talent to create world-class systems, he points out, and its centralised decision-making might impede AI decision-support. Many Chinese experts are also worried about “untrustworthy” AI. “The PLA possesses plenty of lethal military power,” notes Jacob Stokes of CNAS, another think-tank, “but right now none of it appears to have meaningful levels of autonomy enabled by AI”.
China’s apparent sluggishness is part of a broader pattern. Some, like Kenneth Payne of King’s College London, think AI will transform not just the conduct of war, but its essential nature. “This fused machine-human intelligence would herald a genuinely new era of decision-making in war,” he predicts. “Perhaps the most revolutionary change since the discovery of writing, several thousand years ago.” But even as such claims grow more plausible, the transformation remains stubbornly distant in many respects.
Read the full story from The Economist.
More from CNAS
-
Repairing the Breach
Reports
U.S.-India relations stumbled badly during the second half of 2025. Differences between U.S. and Indian officials over how a ceasefire was reached between New Delhi and Islama...
By Lisa Curtis, Keerthi Martyn & Sitara Gupta
-
Video
Indo-Pacific Security / Middle East Security
Iran U.S. War Latest Updates | ‘U.S., Israel Making Gains’: Lisa Curtis On Week 3 of Iran WarThree weeks into the Iran conflict, Lisa Curtis, senior fellow and program director at the Center for a New American Security, says the United States and Israel are making tac...
By Lisa Curtis
-
Reports
Defense / Indo-Pacific Security
U.S.-Japan-Philippines Trilateral CooperationExecutive Summary Growing challenges from the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) massive military modernization, rapid technological advancement, and coercive military activ...
By Lisa Curtis & Ryan Claffey
-
In Brief: Increasing Tensions Between China and Japan Create Risks for the Region
Commentary
This article was originally published in War on the Rocks. China’s latest pressure campaign targeting Japan serves multiple purposes for Beijing. One is to redirect domestic p...
By Jacob Stokes
