Hello, you're listening to NPR's book of the day. I'm Timbermias. Technology has long-shaped

modern warfare, from the development of nuclear weapons to sophisticated drones. But what about

artificial intelligence? What's the role this nascent technology plays in something as high-stakes

and existential as war.

That's the topic of Project Maven, a new book by Bloomberg correspondent Katrina Manson.

In it, she explores how the Defense Department has been using AI to reach its aims,

and the roadblocks it's encountered along the way.

Manson spoke about it with all things considered host Mary

Louise Kelly. The problem with war has always been the humans. We humans are inefficient,

we get tired, we get killed. That is the view of a Marine Corps colonel named Drew Kukor,

who arrived at the conclusion that humans do better

when machines help us, and that AI will completely change, maybe already is changing, the way

that America fights wars. Well, his story is at the heart of a new book about the Pentagon's

campaign to incorporate AI into combat, a campaign known as Project

Maven. Project Maven is also the title of the book. The author is Katrina Manson, and she is in

our New York Bureau. Welcome. Thanks so much. So Project Maven actually gets stood up in 2017. Why? What was happening then that this got greenlit?

By then the U.S. is deep into its forever wars, which are meant to be winding down in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they're also fighting ISIS.

And at this time, several people at the very senior most ranks of the intelligence

and defence communities, are also looking towards a potential future conflict with China

and needing to lean into, in their view, modern tech, cutting-edge tech, seeing that the

commercial world in the US was now relying

on AI increasingly bringing together what was then known as big data and finding out that

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