Retired U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley said last week he believes we are “on the cusp” of seeing militaries around the world powered by robotics – including here in the U.S.
“We know full well that robotics is coming at us very, very rapidly in the commercial sector, and robotics is coming at us very, very rapidly in the military sector as well,” Milley said during a Washington Post Live event on June 13. “You already see that with drone warfare.”
Milley – who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023 – said that over the next 10-15 years we’re going to see “sophisticated militaries,” like the U.S., Russia, and China, “become robotic.”
“We are on the cusp of seeing a pilot-less Air Force, a sailor-less Navy, a crew-less tank,” he said. “It won’t be 100 percent – you’re still going to have pilots and sailors and soldiers, but you’re going to see an increasing use of robots and robotic forces in the years to come, not too far distant from where we are today. And you see these experiments ongoing in all of the services in the U.S. military today.”
Milley noted that no one has yet been able to comprehend how AI will change military services, but offered that “AI has an enormous amount of value.”
“I would argue that AI is probably the most powerful technology ever developed by humans. There is going to be a military application,” Milley said.
“There is already a military application to artificial intelligence, but that’s going to expand tremendously as we move on in time and the nation state or non-nation state actor, terrorist organization, that optimizes the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes, that nation state will have a decisive advantage in the conductive war, and I want that nation to be the United States,” he said.
Separately at the same event, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) leader Jen Easterly keyed on the fact that AI needs safeguards put in place via legislative action because voluntary commitments have “no real teeth.”
“There needs to be safeguards put in place because these capabilities are incredibly powerful, and they could be used in very harmful ways by malicious actors, by terrorists, by criminals, by rogue nations,” Easterly said.
“I spent a lot of time in counterterrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was the head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2013 to 2016. We always talked about Al-Qaeda as chief bomb maker,” she continued, “Now think about Al-Qaeda as chief AI officer.”
“I don’t want to be labeled as a doomer coming out of this talk, because I really am a tech optimist, but I will say at the end of the day, these capabilities are so powerful – they will do amazing things and I will stipulate that – but it is our responsibility to leverage the power of these tools and not suffer a failure of imagination in allowing our adversaries to use these tools in ways that will create unimaginable harm to populations around the world,” Easterly said.
“We cannot allow these communities – who ultimately are fiduciarily responsible to add value to shareholders – we can’t allow them to continue to operate with complete impunity,” the CISA lead said. “We need to come together. We need to work with industry, with technology, with the generative AI companies to ensure that these amazing capabilities can be used safely and securely.”
