YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony King

lines on the record: 54
first: 2025-09-30
most recent: 2025-09-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Many of those decisions cannot be solved by induction. They are definitional. They are interpretive, they are acts of imagination. So the congeal technology, I think will already changing some aspects of military culture. The structure, the practices, the understandings inside of military headquarters that have been partnering with Palantir have changed from 10 years ago. 18th Airborne Court is not the same organization. The structure of the careers is starting to change. The expectations of the staff officers starting to change. Base level, fundamental cultural revolutionary change, I got to say I'm deeply skeptical because the minute we embed it in that context of military operations, adversarial strategy, advertiser warfare, suddenly the technology is a really important aspect, but not even the decisive one in many cases.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want to do operations in an adversarial situation. So one of the key drivers of military culture is the enemy and the operational environment and the application of the technology this congealed labor in AI will be that operational environment, which, as I say, runs away from us. Every piece of technology we get, right, now we can do something faster, better quicker. Right, what other 10 things can we now do? And if you look at the history of military history, that is precisely what happens. Nothing changes because an adversarial environment. And whether you're armed with spears or with machine guns, you're not doing the same thing. So the commander has a load of different decisions to make. And here goes back to my very first point. The commander has loads of decisions to make.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Already allowed human commanders, human militaries to do more complicated operations. In other words, it allows them to do things they couldn't do with the previous technology, setting them a hundred more questions about how to do that technology and what to do. In other words, we end up on a sort of a”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which fuses. The second point is that, you know, I think possibly with something like AI, where it seems it's not just like a machine gun or a tank which has to be driven and is a mundane dull object, even though if you're on the wrong end of it, it's not so mundane or dull. But it seems to be sentient. It seems to be cognizant of the world, et cetera, even though it's not. So what do I think about that? What I think is the key thing is this, is the congealed expertise and knowledge inside of AI is likely to alter some aspects of military culture, how they think about operations. But here's the funny thing. In a certain sense, I don't think it's going to change much in terms of military operations because what AI...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It congealed human knowledge and labor, which isn't co present with us. We're basically working with a bunch of humans who aren't co-present with us. So absolutely, the existence of that new labor congealed that new knowledge congealed into a machine allows us, because we're effectively cooperating with now 10,000 people who aren't there to do new things. What I'd say technology therefore does change what humans can do. It does change what organizations can do. And therefore, as it changes what organizations can do, it changes their culture. But of course, it doesn't mean that for me, it doesn't mean the technology changes the culture. For me, it's congregated social relationship of what the organization is trying to do and what the developers of the technology have tried to do.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is interesting. Look, my answer here is going to be unsatisfactory. You've asked something that's, I think, is, you know, really difficult and profound question of how might we understand technology interacting with culture more wide than with the armed forces. It's a really difficult question. How would I answer it? Let me just try and put some thoughts back which I don't think do justice to the question you've asked, but maybe raise a few questions. So new technology changes things in a certain way. But we always need to remember that technology is just solidified labor in a device. So when we use a piece of technology, what we're using is consolidating.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indispensable, and it does structure the way that Napoleon and Bertiona's staff thought about things, but it didn't determine that they could do a march that they did in 1805. And that's how I think it's better way to think about that curation. It's not deterministic. It has an influence. As scholars and actually, if we're politically aware, we need to be aware of that inference and think about it. But it's not one of simple determination.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It presents challenges, presents challenges of accuracy, it presents challenges of inverted automation. But I think the actual process will be more complicated. And I think, as I say, it will be more complicated because even the best AI programs will not obvious answers to everything. Their application will be much tighter. I mean, as I say, many AI programs, I would equate them with a map from the early modern period from 19th, 20th century, where you can't do a military operation with a map without the map. And it allows you to do different kinds of military operations. But can you explain Napoleon's Ulga or his Australitz campaign just by the existence of a map produced by the French government, by a branch, the French government? No, the map is a...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The application of AI that should be in a small bit, so you've got a little bit of help on decision making in one area, start to be taken more widely into direct decisions more widely. I think that's possible, but let me emphasize the point. Even in that case, it's not AI taking over. unseen, it's hidden tech labor and expertise being presumed to be correct. It's not, you know, we shouldn't fetishize the AI into thinking it's taking over.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The influence, I think, will be more limited real, but more limited. Second point is this. What your discussion points towards, and this actually goes back to a point that I kind of pointed to, but let me bring it out more fully. There is a concern that there'll be about something called the automation bias, that Palantir, for instance, will generate a program that gives pretty plausible results in a crisis. The military go right, let's just do that. That's what that's the result. Let's just follow that. In other words, it's not that there's some kind of systematic AI power that takes over. It's just in a crisis, in difficult situations where people don't have enough information. They grab for the nearest thing and they start to use and rely on AI in a way they shouldn't. And I think that's possible. In other words, I think it's possible that this...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The decision making, the military decision making strategy, military operations involve decisions that go well beyond those curated data archives, those maps and networks and results that programs like Palanti's Gotham or Metacon are producing, that they are sub parts of decision making. It doesn't just colonize the entire practice of command. What you've got is effectively a map that might influence certain elements of the design of a campaign and certain sub-elements of decision making. So it's not, in my view, as simple as a complete colonization. Secondly, so it's”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is the next topic I really want to do some, you know, this I see this is an initial piece of work and I want to continue to work on this. And the issue of decision making under AI is for me the crux of the whole matter and one which I really want to invest some time in. What would I say here? First of all It absolutely is true that companies like Palantir, curating military data, governmental data are making the maps and therefore pre-influencing pre-structuring decision making. Yeah. So that's true. But I'd say a couple of caveats.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a lovely question, and your description, I think, is a really profound description of the influence, the way the influence of tech into the pre-influencing understanding and decision making by structuring data and what's presented. I think I completely agree with you and think it's highly lucid and profound. Absolutely. I say, first of all, I say two things. One, note, the minute we start to talk like that, which is the way to talk in my view, we're not talking about automation. We're talking about human teens of experts and entrepreneurs fixing maps that then the military use to make decisions. And the question is, are the maps they're making accurate or are they just illusions on which the basis of terrible decisions will be made? In terms of the decision making,”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely critical figure in negotiating this alliance between emergent tech and military and security needs for the US. Other figures, of course, is for sure. Peter Thiel and actually, I'm sure Sam Altman at OpenAI will be incorporated very soon into that kind of pantheon of important kind of entrepreneurs switch points between the two spheres.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Governmental, commercial, military, civil cooperation and integration rather than any sort of incorporation and direction of Silicon Valley by government. And here's the thing. Maybe that will mean that Silicon Valley retains its more creative, innovative, it's famously innovative ethos that by having that, it's working for and with government with the Pentagon, but as an independent entity. And maybe that will give them some competitive advantages. There's disadvantages of the American model in comparison with the Chinese on other things, but maybe that will give them some competitive advantage. But that's the way I would envisage it. And, you know, you cite Alex Carp, I think, is a key figure in this reconfiguration. Eric Schmidt.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it seems to me clear that they have aligned themselves with the political establishment, especially with the DOD, and that will continue and deepen. And it will continue and deepen because look at the geostrategic situation of increased competition with China especially and increased economic and military and political tensions. For me, I see a deepening of that alliance, but it won't be a Chinese solution, as you rightly say in my view. It will be a Western Republican model.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With U.S. national interest. I mean, this is a general move in the US generally on both sides, both Democrat and Republican sides of the House and the spectrum. With US national interests in general against China and with their security interests. And so what I suggest is what we see is Silicon Valley still is going to maintain its economic, financial, business, intellectual independence in a way that Chinese companies won't and never have enjoyed.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An AI model a program, a machine learning program will be taught to recognize digital signatures in digital video footage. Result, it was successful. Google got the contract and there was a protest in Google in 2018, which then Google relinquished the project, relinquished the contract. And at the time and subsequently, people have taken this as evidence that the Silicon Valley is not trustable. It's a global organization. It's a globally orientated libertarian organization. But to me, that was the last moment of that period of genuine global libertarianism in Silicon Valley. And thereafter, 2018 onwards, and actually with increasing force, especially now with the election of President Trump, Silicon Valley is a line itself very closely.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Globalization in which markets and money is everything and states and people don't count and all that mass is enrichment through borderless markets. And I mean, that undoubtedly influenced that first wave of digitalization, the great companies, you know, especially Microsoft and similar Microsoft Facebook, the Google, the various other key primes. But what was very interesting to me, of course, is this period 2017-2018 and the protest at Google in March 2018 where Google has got the contract for Project Maven, the digitalized machine learning targeting project from the Pentagon where the idea was”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So thanks for that again. Yeah, so I found this process of the realignment of Silicon Valley. Especially, I think, as a British citizen, I found it extremely interesting that the fact is from its origins in the late 50s and especially in the 70s and 80s, despite and despite its dependence on the Pentagon at that particular time for quite a bit of its funding, Silicon Valley have always distinguished itself from East Coast industries and especially from defense industries. And that was, you know, and it was, especially from 2000 onwards, it sought itself as a global libertarian order, which was the absolute pinnacle of the kinds of things that President Trump absolutely hates, absolutely border.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And still preserving some democratic, Republican hold over them. I think that is a key issue. And of course, the problem here is that China doesn't even begin to have to answer this question. And that is they have a huge, not AI advantage, they have a huge organizational advantage which may manifest itself in an AI advantage when it comes to any hopefully avoidable future conflict. So my message on that, unfortunately, is quite negative and pessimistic, I'm afraid.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How that is going to be reversed. And indeed, the evidence the last 20 years is that even universities can't hold onto the top people. Jeffrey Hinson, Jan Lacun, are all going over to the tech sector to become their AI gurus and chiefs over there. So the actual leach. How will states and governments, how will military forces negotiate and create an agreement and a partnership with those companies that are so powerful and whose functions are totally indispensable to military operations today?”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For regulation of AI because they think general AI is going to appear and on the threat of the existential risk of general AI and artificial superintelligence, what they're doing is entrenching their monopoly around Silicon Valley. And I read a lot of their statements, just they're terrified that a small tech startup is going to generate in our program that actually does what they can do with small amounts of data, less computing power. That is a slightly polemical set of statements I just made, but why do I say them to emphasize that I really don't see a rebalancing of the sector? On the contrary, I think that the monopolies that Silicon Valley have had since the kind of digital revolution from the 80s, 90s and accelerating, I just don't see how...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the supporting tech sector and democratized and fragmented out, or it's going to be nationalized and regulated in the West. Now, in China, it's a different question because the links between the tech sector and government, there's almost no boundaries. But in the West, and if anything, I see a consolidation of this process. We look at the whole emergence of open AI, its ability to influence regulation. I mean, one of the interesting things about over the last two years has been interesting is how much discussion there's been about the requirement for the regulation of AI. And a large number of people who are saying, oh, AI is dangerous. We're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, is key figures in the tech sector. And you look at their actual political intervention. What are they asking for? Here's my view. They're asking.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of institutions locked together actually in a tight geographical area in Silicon Valley, essentially. I mean, okay, Amazon's in Seattle, but apart from, you know, it's a tight thing. Do I see a rebalancing? No, I don't. I think one of the most important things I say, and this goes back to my organization point, is one of the most interesting important things about digitalization and AI is the political, economic, organizational transformation, which speaks to me to a profound reconfiguration of Western politics, economy and society around the concentrations, these extraordinarily powerful and rich companies. I just don't see how that capital, you know, that extraordinary concentration of capital is going to be prized from the hands of those companies.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's such a great question. Let's try and think about it. So my position on this would be this. You're absolutely right in that what we see as market concentration and actually a monopolization of certain bits, key bits of capital, the compute power, the data, the people into very isolated monopolizing sectors of the and it is in the case of the West is the US economy, Silicon Valley, and a handful, the tech primes and then in the defense sector there's a few others, Palanto Allen Drill who've come to be important players. So absolutely we have a sort of organic unplanned concentration of economic and human and computing capital in a set.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's great issue. Great question. And there you are at some point asking me to slightly predict the future and project. And as I said, very...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case, but what you see is a configuration, a civil military configuration, a private sector, public sector configuration, which Is highly unusual. It's novel historically. There are parallels that go back to the early modern period, but it really is very different from 20th century, military, industrial relations. And obviously as a sociologist, I found that both fascinating and quite comforting, though, of course, there's a political bit that is not comforting that's quite concerning. For me, the issue of AI as the most radical technology we've seen for a while is paradoxically, the key issue is organizational. We should focus on the organization of AI, not on AI as automation.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that the tech companies understand the immediate problem that the military is facing. And then once they developed AI programs, machine learning programs, generative But also very important and actually potentially quite dangerous politically. And that is a fusion of the military and the tech, a deep partnership of the tech sector and the military, and a deep partnership that goes into military operations themselves. So, for instance, in terms of targeting in Ukraine, companies like Palantir have been involved in those targeting systems. Elon Musk Starlink was totally critical to Ukrainian military effort. It also gave him a nefarious, notorious influence over the campaign in 2022-2023, when, in fact, in September 2023, he shut the system off because he wasn't happy about Ukrainian plans to attack Sevastopol. So what you see, that's an extreme pathological.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Computer programming, they don't have the human expertise in terms of computer scientists, data engineers. They don't have the computing power in terms of hyperscale centers. So they are completely reliant on the tech sector, tech companies and tech defense companies a way that they've not been in the past. Now, of course, they've been reliant on industrial companies, arms manufacturers to produce materials for them, yes. But arms manufacturers make the weapons, deliver it to them, the armed forces decide how to use them. The very odd thing about artificial intelligence is that in order to utilize it and operationalize it, there needs to be a deep integrated relationship between the armed force and the tech sector so that the software and data is developed together.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Live data, mass data, and AI to process that data to get results that it wants. And here I must say I found the whole transformation that we've seen over the last 10 years. We could stretch it out to 15, possibly 20. But really, we're looking at a very recent development, 510, is a very strange partnership with Silicon Valley and the tech sector and especially with tech defense companies. The armed force is powerful that they are have no experience of data at this scale.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What became clear as I did this work, which I, you know, it's, you know, I see this project as the beginning of a journey for me, which I found fascinating, is exactly this. The organizational effects of AI and more, I might put it the other way around, the organizational transformations that need to go on in order that you can get AI doing things like targeting and planning for you or with the joint or command control system. Of course, this is an aspirational system, a full multi-domain situational awareness system for all of US forces. This is aspirational. I think it will be very creaky actually in the end. But the key point is, what are the organizational requirements in order that a military force can apply?”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I mean, this is a completely critical point. So if I could just sort of answer this question slightly with a slight oblique sort of biography or autobiography. So when I first started the work on AI, I was seriously concerned as a sociologist because on my reading, if what various scholars were arguing about AI, namely that it could automate strategy, the decision to go to war, how to make war, if it had actual agency in a genuine human sense. Well, I'm a sociologist. Essentially, I'm out of business because then the issue of agency moves into computer science domain. It's not about social agency. It's not about humans. It's about programs. And I actually was seriously worried.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This comes back to my previous point. Lavender had not defined the Gaza war, hadn't defined the operation. Nanyahu, his cabinet, senior generals in the IDF, defined what that operation was. Lavender came in as an effective targeting system to generate targets for them. And we might do a thought experiment here. What would have happened if IDF had not had lavender? They, in my view, would have bombed Garsa very heavily on the basis of poor intelligence. And so the results might have been worse or about the same. So the idea that Lavender had agency in this process, it had capability, the idea it had moral, legal, military agency, decision-making agency, I don't agree with. It's a very serious system, but it's a system like a weapon system or a satellite system.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the process seems to me to be an extremely useful one in terms of understanding the application. As I say, there's got to be a bounded problem. There's got to be data to which you can apply that problem before you can begin to develop these kind of programs. I'd say one other thing about both things, which I'm sure we want to come on to. People have suggested that lavender is responsible for, although large numbers of civilian deaths in Gaza somehow has automated the war itself. I totally disagree with that. Lavender-generated targets that Israel could prosecute. Israel decided to prosecute those targets because they had decided on a strategy in which collateral damage and civilian casualties were allowable. They changed their strategy in Charlie from previous interventions.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI organizing a column of tanks, moving or column of vehicles, moving up a road. But when we're talking about the delivery of lethal ordnance into a civilian building, at that point, questions become asked. And there's two obvious examples, Project Maeve and the US example, but the famous one now is lavender, the IDF's system, where they've collected huge amounts of data on Hamas in particular, but other Palestinian terrorist groups based on mobile phone data, sensor data, presumably satellite images, probably digitalized human source images, to basically create a huge data archive of the Hamas operatives, Hamas structures, Hamas geolocations. And on the result, on the basis of this programming lavender, the IDF were able to generate Well, the figure that is in the public minus 37,000 Hamas targets.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seeking a solution that you know you've got that solution when the AI generates and you know when it's wrong. So this was a really clear case and there's no doubt this was a very simple case there's others more confidential, more classified that have already been in place. Western armies generally, the US Army, US forces generally are way ahead and are applying much like data and AI to these problems, to logistic problems much more widely. But that case study shows the procedure. The targeting issue is critical and the targeting obviously is critical because at the end of targeting are people getting killed. And so obviously it's a critical military issue and it's a critical issue that obviously lawyers and ethicists have been concerned about because that's where nobody particularly minds about”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Goes very big on rhetoric of the ease of application without specifying the problems. When we actually go to talk to practitioners, the identification of the problem to which you can apply AI is one of the key problems of applying AI. And what was very interesting to me in this case is here was a case where the British Army, they're much further left behind than the US Army tried to identify case study, a case example for the application and successfully within about eight months executed and developed a program. That seemed to be a very useful model, not just for the British Army, but me as a scholar of what it will look like to apply AI and just repeat just to say, you need a key problem, you need a clear bounded set of data that you can apply to that problem. And you need a”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, the hardware of it was in a hardened sort of box that could be movable, which essentially allowed for route planning, automation of route planning. And within what would take hours for a staff officer and a team of staff officers to eventually took seconds for this program to automate. Essentially, it was a military form of ways or Google Maps. And it worked very effectively. It was a small, and the army was completely realistic about this. This wasn't the final application of AI to the issue of planning. This was a controlled experiment for what the British Army could do. But empirically for me, it was a really important case. Why? Because the argument about the application of AI.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Apply some form of artificial intelligence. In this case, it was quite a simple form of machine learning to the issue of planning. And in this case, to the issue of route planning, which routes can you actually move an operation along? And it sounds a totally mundane. It is a totally mundane thing. But in the past, it's taken staff officers a long time to plan routes. But as an example that the British Army wanted to explore to see the potential because here you had a simple bounded example in which there was very significant data. People knew the topography on which ropes were, the mapping was possible. It was possible to work out observation where the roads could be observed from. Anyway, so an institution in the British Army, enhanced command and control spearhead, developed a software program in a hard”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so thanks for that. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I might say, yeah, they, you know, Gaza, Ukraine represent Maybe not radical revolutions, but they're important moments where I think the application of live data processed by certain forms of AI, sometimes quite simple forms of machine learning, but certain forms of AI have become routinely used by the military. I think that that is very important. As I say, is it a revolution? I'm skeptical. I'm always skeptical about revolutions, but it's a transformation. Now, in terms of application, so let's just talk to two examples, concrete ones that you've referred to. And one of them is very simple, it's a very small example where the British Army following COVID started about 2019, but really post COVID, began to want to explore whether they could”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very easy to make hyperbolic jumps of what the capabilities are to assume a complete colonization of what war involves. Important to avoid that, but also to recognize these key areas where AI has made a difference and I would anticipate as models become better and more accurate they will become more effective in those subfunctions.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of their application to warfare, it's complicated now. Then the next question comes is, so what can you apply that system to? And here the application is clear and very potent. And for me, it's not the entire sphere of warfare being automated. It's the automation of data processing for intelligence purposes and situational awareness purposes. And this then distills into three key functions. Firstly, AI can be used and has been used to help planning, to help logistics. Secondly, and most controversially but most successfully, it's been used to target. We've seen that in Gaza. We've seen that against ISIS in terms of US models. And finally, it's used for cyber operations, cyber defense, offensive cyber operations. Also, information operations where AI, sometimes in very simple forms like bots, is able to generate content.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that exceed AI, namely, there's lots of decisions we need to make for which there's no real data as in binary digital information processable by a computer. There's lots of evidence, but there's not data. And there's other elements to warfare which involve moral judgment, ethical judgments, leadership, which actually influence the way we define the situation and define the mission, define the operation, define what we're trying to do, which can't be reducible to AI as it's currently constituted or conceivably constituted on its current basis in inductive statistical systems. So what I suggest is the powers of AI, you know, every single person needs to be aware of these powers. But in terms of...”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“False. So, one of the critical things that any armed forces, any military commander, any general needs to do before the start of an operation and during an operation is to define what they're actually doing. What's the purpose of this operation? Why are we fighting in Gaza? Why are we fighting in Ukraine? What are we trying to achieve? Those are constitutive of the action of the war itself. They're definitional. They're not an answer that second generation, even the most sophisticated generative AI model can give to a human group. It's the humans and the collective, their political enterprise that determines what those decision-making decisions are. Now, there's loads of other practices in war, which also, in terms of the manipulation, the coordination of warfare,”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Establish good data, AI, artificial general intelligence, and machine learning can produce results, which frankly exceed humans. The issue is, is that how strategy works? Is that how armed forces make decisions? Is that how decisions in war go on? And there is no doubt there are some decisions that are made in war that are inductive, that are based on correlations between existing evidence on the basis of which in the past humans, i.e. commanders in their headquarters, their staff officers, made inductions from that basis. But the notion that Strathun War is reducible to pure statistical probability.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. Well, thanks again for that, and thanks for that very insightful question. Yeah. So, I mean, as many people know, second generation AI, including generative AI, including large language models, operate on a probabilistic inductive system, i.e. they process large amounts of data. I mean, when I say large, absolutely vast amounts of data to identify mathematical statistical correlations in that data. When the data is good enough, when it's accurate enough, when it's big enough, those inductive processing produces correlations which tend towards nearly 99% accuracy. Basically, they're 100% accurate in terms of identifying correlation. That is unbelievably useful and powerful. And it has been shown in various fields from Alpha Go plane goal to... Medical research to looking at cancer screening where you have predictable”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a refutation, a sceptical, hopefully not a refutation in a negative way, but a recalibration of the debates about AI strategy and warfare. And what I'm seeking to do is in place of a teological belief that, look, artificial general intelligence is about to happen. Artificial superintelligence is about to happen, and therefore we are already on the road to that endpoint. And every piece of evidence points to it. Instead of that, I just wanted to take that endpoint away and look at the evidence itself and provide a skeptical view where we looked realistically at what the functions are and will be in the short term and how they're going to apply. And my essential argument was, look, AI is already a very significant factor in strategy and war. But it's miles away from the vision of automating war and strategy.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is moving towards the bounds of general intelligence already and superintelligence is only five, ten years away. Well, what is the implication for warfare? Well, the implication for warfare must be that a entity, a program that knows more than a human commander in general, that can process that knowledge and action knowledge more quickly and more accurately, will eventually displace human commanders, human leaders, human generals, human commanders-in-chief to prosecute war, to decide when, where, how to fight wars, and who to kill on its own. In short, the argument across a lot of literature is we are on the cusp of some significant automation of strategy and warfare itself on the basis, one of this belief in the teleological development of AI and its application.”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10, 15, 20 years in some intensity, and of course, they go back to the 50s in a looser sense. Is the notion that on the basis of that automatic processing of massive data, computer programs will be able to generate results that humans can't see and can't develop and eventually AI will develop general intelligence, i.e. be able to apply its programming across a wide range of activities to basically outperform humans until it reaches a level of superintelligence. Now, that kind of argument has filtered into security and strategic studies very strongly. So the essential argument is this, that if artificial intelligence is developing so quickly, if it's exceeding human intelligence so quickly that it”
2025-09-30 · Intelligence Squared · Is AI About to Automate War? With Anthony King · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT