Promise or peril? Artificial Intelligence, human-machine interaction, and the risk of war

Against the backdrop of increasing global tensions, transformative technologies -notably artificial intelligence (AI) -are poised to revolutionise how the military wages war and how leaders think about, prepare for, and decide to go to war.Defence departments worldwide are betting hard on innovation as a catalyst for strategic advantage, eagerly integrating advanced sensing, collection, and analytical tools for strategic, operational, and tactical purposes.These capabilities tend to be nested in frontier decision support systems (DSS), which are increasingly pitched as critical to ensure decision-makers have sufficient information to compete against adversaries (and with allies) in an operational environment with shorter time horizons and voluminous data and, presumably, under conditions of existential threat.The focus of this paper is how specific AI-enabled DSS may alter how military and political actors make sense of, and ultimately act in response to, their threat environment -including whether to escalate a crisis or commence conflict.1Uncertainty lies at the heart of classic theoretical works of international relations, including (but not limited to): Hans J.