An NPR 2023 "Books We Love" Pick One of the Next Big Idea Club's Must-Read Books "An invaluable primer to arguably the most important driver of change for our future." —P. W. Singer, author of Burn-In An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry—the struggle to control artificial intelligence. A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives—and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future. Four Battlegrounds argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power—control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military. Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology. Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom—and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

The field of value alignment, or more broadly machine ethics, is becoming increasingly important as artificial intelligence developments accelerate. By ‘alignment’ we mean giving a generally intelligent software system the capability to act in ways that are beneficial, or at least minimally harmful, to humans. There are a large number of techniques that are being experimented with, but this work often fails to specify what values exactly we should be aligning. When making a decision, an agent is supposed to maximize the expected utility of its value function. Classically, this has been referred to as happiness, but this is just one of many things that people value. In order to resolve this issue, we need to determine a set of human values that represent humanity's interests. Although this problem might seem intractable, research shows that people of various cultures and religions actually share more in common than they realize. In this book we review world religions, moral philosophy and evolutionary psychology to elucidate a common set of shared values. We then show how these values can be used to address the alignment problem and conclude with problems and goals for future research. The key audience for this book will be researchers in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence who are interested in, or working on this problem. These people will come from various professions and include philosophers, computer programmers and psychologists, as the problem itself is multi-disciplinary.

This book explores the profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on geopolitical dynamics and its implications for the global order. As AI continues to advance, it is reshaping traditional power structures, altering economic landscapes, and transforming military strategies. This book delves into key areas of AI's influence, including economic competitiveness, national security, and the evolution of international cooperation and conflict. It analyzes the potential benefits and risks associated with AI deployment, such as enhancing productivity, exacerbating inequality, and introducing new security vulnerabilities. By examining case studies and global trends, this book offers insights into the changing dynamics of international relations driven by AI, highlighting the importance of strategic foresight, ethical considerations, and international collaboration to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by this transformative technology.

War in the 21st century will remain a chameleon that takes on different forms and guises. This book offers the first comprehensive update and revision of ideas about the future of war since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It argues that the war has fundamentally shifted our perspective on the nature and character of future war, but also cautions against marginalizing many other parallel trends, types of war, and ways of waging them. World-renowned international experts from the War Studies field consider the impact of the war in Ukraine on the broader social phenomenon of war: they analyze visions of future war; examine the impact of technological innovation on its conduct; assess our ability to anticipate its future; and consider lessons learned for leaders, soldiers, strategists, scholars and concerned citizens. Beyond Ukraine features contributions from Azar Gat, Beatrice Heuser, Antulio Echevarria, Audrey Cronin, T.X. Hammes, Kenneth Payne, Frank Hoffman, David Betz, Jan Willem Honig, and many other pre-eminent thinkers on the past, present and future of war--including an afterword by the late Christopher Coker.

Across the political spectrum, there is wide agreement that Asia should be at the center of US foreign policy. But this worldview, the "Pivot to Asia" announced by the Obama Administration in 2011, is a dramatic departure from the entire history of American grand strategy. Ten years on, we now have some perspective to evaluate it in depth. In The Lost Decade, Robert Blackwill and Richard Fontaine take this long view. They conclude that there are few successes to speak of, and that we lack a coherent approach to the Indo-Pacific region. They examine the Pivot through various lenses: situating it historically in the context of America's global foreign policy, revealing the inside story of how it came about, assessing the effort thus far, identifying the ramifications in other regions (namely Europe and the Middle East), and proposing a path forward.

This book outlines the concept of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) and demonstrates its relevance for understanding contemporary conflicts. Non-kinetic modes of attack and war waged by groups or non-state actors at the societal level has been termed 5GW. This book discusses the theory of generational warfare and explores the key ideas of 5GW, such as secrecy, the manipulation of proxies, the manipulation of identity and culture (including disinformation and big data), and the use of psychological warfare. These techniques are used to achieve strategic objectives, such as inducing desired behaviour and controlling human terrain, without resorting to overt war or overt violence. The text expands the debate on 5GW by exploring emerging technologies and how they could be used for maliciously shaping human society and even for maliciously changing the genetic makeup of a population for the purpose of unprecedented social control. The work closes with comments on the possibility of a Sixth Generation of Warfare, which targets technical systems to possibly collapse a society through strategic sabotage. Overall, the book demonstrates the relevance of 5GW for understanding contemporary conflicts, from the Arab Spring to the war in Ukraine, in terms of the need for dominating the human domain. This book will be of interest to students of security and technology, defence studies and International Relations.

Recommendations from the scientific community to ensure that the development and use of AI honors scientific norms In late 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an AI chatbot capable of generating conversational answers and analyses, as well as images, in response to user questions and prompts. This generative AI is built with computational procedures, such as large language models, that train on vast bodies of human-created and curated data, including huge amounts of scientific literature. Since then, the worry that AI may someday outsmart humans has only grown more widespread. In the past, as society grappled with the implications of new technologies—ranging from nuclear energy to recombinant DNA—the scientific community developed practices designed to increase adherence to the norms that have protected the integrity of each new form of scientific exploration, development, and deployment. In the process, scientists expanded their community’s repertoire of mechanisms designed to advance emerging science and technology while safeguarding the integrity of science and the wellbeing of the nation and its people. This book provides a historical perspective on and an ethical approach to emerging AI technologies; an overview of AI frameworks and principles; and an assessment of AI’s current advances, hurdles, and potential. Experts from the fields of behavioral and social sciences, ethics, biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science, as well as leaders in higher education, law, governance, and science publishing and communication, comprise the book’s contributors. Their essays remind us that, even as our understandings of emerging technologies and of their implications evolve, science’s commitment to core norms and values remains steadfast. The volume’s conclusion advocates for following principles of human accountability and responsibility when using artificial intelligence in research, including transparent disclosure and attribution; verification and documentation of AI-generated data and analysis; a focus on ethics and equity; and continuous oversight and public engagement.

An exploration of the influential work of Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has moved over 50 million units globally, as well as Snatcher, Policenauts, and Death Stranding. As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between games and other forms of media, arguing that games could be deep experiences that unearthed complex emotions from players on the same level as films or novels. Drawing on archives of interviews in English and Japanese with Kojima and his team, as well as academic discourses of social/political games and cinematic narrative/world-building, this book examines Kojima's progressive game design as it applies to four key areas: socially-relevant narratives, cinematic aesthetics, thematically-connected systems, and reflexive spaces.