In 1983, the U.S. military’s research and development arm began a ten-year, $1 billion machine intelligence program aimed at keeping the United States ahead of its technological rivals. From the start, computer scientists criticized the project as unrealistic. It promised big and ultimately failed hard in the eyes of the Pentagon, ushering in a long artificial intelligence (AI) “winter” during which potential funders, including the U.S. military, shied away from big investments in the field and abandoned promising areas of research.
Today, AI is once again the darling of the national security services. And once again, it risks sliding backward as a result of a destructive “hype cycle” in which overpromising conspires with inevitable setbacks to undermine the long-term success of a transformative new technology. Military powers around the world are investing heavily in AI, seeking battlefield and other security applications that might provide an advantage over potential adv
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In coming months, new US President Joe Biden and his advisers will of necessity focus on the most immediate task at hand quelling the COVID-19 pandemic and reducing its economic impacts. But they will also have to decide how to pursue, in specifics, the many broad goals President Biden set out in his campaign. As is the case with every new US administration, the president and his appointees will be deluged with policy proposals that deal with programs and projects vast and minuscule and that come from every ideological direction imaginable (except perhaps the purely Trumpist; it is hard to imagine the QAnon, Infowars, and Parler crowds expecting or getting much traction in a Biden administration).