Ted Audio Collective

You're listening to Ted Talks Daily, I'm Elise Hugh.

One of the scariest implications for AI is how it would be used in war.

In his talk from Ted 2023, AI technologist Alexander Wang asks us to consider the implications

for fast advancing AI when it comes to our global systems like democracy after a sponsor message.

Artificial intelligence and warfare.

Let's talk about what this really could look like.

Swarms of lethal drones with facial recognition that know your every move

or unmanned armed robots that are near impossible to defeat.

Autonomous fighter jets that can travel at supersonic speeds and can withstand greater gravitational force than the human pilot could survive.

Cyberattacks that incapacitate critical port infrastructure or disinformation campaigns and deepfakes that throw presidential elections

or even foreign adversaries take out satellites or eyes and ears in space,

renegotiable to global events.

All super intelligent weapons of terror.

We're the dawn of a new age of warfare.

I grew up in the birthplace of a technology that defined the last era of warfare, the atomic bomb.

I was keenly aware of how this technology had fundamentally shaped geopolitics and the nature of war.

My parents were both scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

My dads are physicists and my moms and astrophysicists.

Their scientific work in plasma fluid dynamics will have deep implications for how we understand our universe.

So naturally, I knew I wanted to work on something just as impactful.

I decided to become a programmer and study artificial intelligence.

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