AI’s Inhuman Advantage

Paul Scharre argues that the militaries that will be most successful in harnessing AI’s advantages will be those that effectively understand and employ its unique and often alien forms of cognition. Taking a look at gameplaying AI, he sees common patterns emerging about AI’s potential advantages over humans. The first is increased speed and scale of information processing. The second related to keeping the overview. AI agents can look more holistically at the entire state of a game. That gives the AI agents greater orientation and awareness of the whole of the action and the ability to optimally prioritize resources. 

Thirdly, compared with human beings, the attentiveness of AI agents enables them to avoid making careless mistakes. Fourthly, AI agents appear to have major advantages over humans in coordination and long-term planning. A fifth advantage is key: precision, which opens up innovative strategies unavailable to humans. For example, AI agents have the ability to engage in dramatic shifts in strategies and risk-taking in ways that are different from human players and, in some cases, impossible for human players to match.

Despite all these advantages, Sharre concludes that not all will be helpful in onboarding AI into the military. For example, AI’s unconventional or unpredictable moves or decisions may make integration harder. What is key for militaries is to learn how to marry human and machine cognition and take advantage of the unusual attributes of how AI systems think.