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Artificial Intelligence, Cyberattacks and Nuclear Weapons: A Dangerous Combination,  Stratfor, By Pavel Sharikov, for the EastWest Institute  31 May 19, Artificial intelligence (AI) — defined by John McCarthy, one of the doyens of AI, as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines” — is slowly gaining relevance in the military domain. While commercial use of AI is widening, there are only three countries that are reported to be developing serious military AI technologies: the United States, China and Russia. AI promises a significant military advantage to a nation’s offensive and defensive military capabilities.

AI now has the capacity to be merged with sophisticated but untried, new weaponry, such as offensive cyber capabilities. This is an alarming development, as it has the potential to destabilize the balance of military power among the leading industrial nations. Notably, with the advent of machine learning and AI, more targets have become available for computer hacking, meaning that critical infrastructure — banking systems, airport flight tracking, hospital records, the programs that run the nation’s nuclear power reactors — are vulnerable to attacks.

One of the most pressing problems, however, lies in the destabilizing effects of sophisticated cyber weaponry, enhanced by AI technology, on the balance of nuclear power. There is no definite proof that nuclear command and control systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks, but these systems are digital, hence the vulnerability exists.

The destabilizing effect of sophisticated AI cyber weaponry is of special concern for U.S.-Russia relations. Indeed, defending against such weapons and protecting a nation’s hardware, software and data against attack, has become an important issue in bilateral relations — on par with nuclear arms control and accidental conventional military escalation.

Today, the owners of the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons — Russia and the United States — are locked in, arguably, a new Cold War. Many of the traditional communication channels, including military ones, are compromised or broken, destabilizing nuclear diplomacy between the two countries. Along with the U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the arms control regime created during the Cold War can no longer guarantee strategic stability. The existence of new technologies, such as cyber capabilities paired with AI, will only amplify this destabilizing trend.

In fact, a new technological, rather than nuclear, AI cyber arms race may have already begun………

A Way Forward

Even though it is impossible to reverse the advances of AI development, it is still possible to work out the rules of an arms race involving this technology. In this regard, it is worth thinking about the experience of Soviet-American agreements when anti-ballistic missile (ABM) technologies were introduced in the 1970s. Instead of getting into an arms race centered around this new technology, the Soviet Union and the United States agreed to accept mutual vulnerabilities and, for the sake of strategic stability, abandoned plans to field more advanced anti-ballistic missile technologies as evidenced by the ABM treaty, which remained in force until 2002.

The ABM treaty could serve as the basis for a similar agreement on AI cyber weapons……. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/artificial-intelligence-cyberattacks-and-nuclear-weapons-dangerous-combination