Warfare is always evolving, sometimes slowly: Napoleon’s armies travelled little differently from those of Julius Caesar. At other times, change comes faster than commanders can process, as the futile carnage of the First World War showed. The pace of change on the battlefield today? Fast – very fast.

Introducing the first war brought to you by artificial intelligence. In the first ten days of a campaign that may well have been prepared in a hurry, the US and Israel pinpointed and targeted as many Iranian sites in the first four days as the anti-ISIS coalition did in the first six months of its campaign in Iraq and Syria.

How good are AI-informed kill orders? Are computers already making the call?

The New York Times reports that it was probably humans who mistakenly decided to hit a girls’ school, killing 175. Even if outdated intelligence may be to blame, we’ll ask our panel what role AI might have played.

And what responsibility do tech companies bear when their tools lead to war crimes and mass surveillance? In the battle between Anthropic and the US government over the proper use of its software, who gets the final say: the company, or the government? Especially when the power of this technology is something we do not yet fully grasp.

 

Produced by François Picard, Rebecca Gnignati, Daniel Whittington, Ilayda Habip.