About this Event
Award-winning reporter Katrina Manson went in search of the reality of AI targeting for her new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI warfare to tell the story of the US companies and defense officials making AI warfare a reality and to try to discover what was inside the black box.The US has deployed AI to war on a scale never before seen, hitting 1,000 targets within the first 24 hours of operations against Iran with the help of the Maven Smart System digital platform from Palantir Technologies Inc, which emerged from a 2017 Pentagon effort named Project Maven.Cheerleaders argue that AI and the automation it makes possible will save lives. They argue AI-empowered systems could deter conflict with China—or help win World War III, in which automated machines will putatively run combat at a pace faster than humans can understand. National security strategists now worry that no country can win a war without AI.Detractors think AI has already led to civilian deaths, will lead to more war, and potentially hasten the end of the world. Still more think the claims made for AI war tools are grandiose and the truth will be more prosaic, suffering from problems of rickety infrastructure, adoption, and trust.
Maven has arguably underpinned the rise of Palantir, which is now among the highest valued defense-tech companies in the world and whose chief executive Alex Karp has talked about his company’s technology killing “mostly terrorists.”Several other companies are also involved in producing battlefield AI for Maven Smart System: Amazon Web Services, Anthropic and Microsoft among them.The UN’s aim to ban lethal autonomous weapons that select their own targets with the help of AI by 2026 is a lost hope. And yet AI remains a narrow, faulty tool with considerable limits to its usefulness and reliability that the US military is still discovering. AI warfare can go wrong, and it is already here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Frontline Club, 13 Norfolk Place, London, United Kingdom
GBP 5.94 to GBP 16.63
