【英文】兰德公司报告：脑机接口：美国军事应用和意义，初步评估（45页）

英文研究报告 2020-09-09 4 管理员

To address the potential for information overload, future service members are likely to engage more extensively with AI. On the future battlefield, AI tools may help human operators assess an environment, curate data, and ultimately allow operators to digest greater volumes of information.75 Already, the U.S. Army has sought to leverage AI to “lighten the cognitive load” on future warfighters as a core capability objective of its 2017 Robotic and Autonomous Systems strategy.76 As AI and rapid connectivity are increasingly incorporated into military operations, the pace of warfare will continue to accelerate.77 Thus the speed at which decisions need to be made will also accelerate. In the coming decades, the United States and near-peer competitors are likely to seek out new ways to speed up decision cycles.78 Finally, the future human warfighter may need to oversee and interact with a larger number of autonomous and semiautonomous systems.79 Drone swarms may be incorporated at the tactical and operational levels in complex urban environments.80 Future ground operations will incorporate robotics into supply and logistics chains. 81 Already, service members can look to uninhabited aircraft flying above the combat zone for ISR and close air support. Additional combat applications for machines could include, for example, a robot that would be the first to enter a building and take fire, currently one of the deadliest roles in urban warfare.

Laboratory studies indicate that BCIs may be able to enhance both the speed and accuracy of human decisionmaking.82 In a future BCI team, AI could theoretically transfer initial data analysis from a plane or drone directly to the relevant centers of an operator’s brain to further reduce cognitive load.83 In combat, BCI could thus accelerate an operator’s observe, orient, decide, act (OODA) loop, through new ways of presenting information and bypassing physical senses.84 Thus, DARPA cites the potential ability of military personnel to “facilitate multitasking at the speed of thought” and “interface with smart decision aids” as two rationales for its investment in noninvasive or minutely invasive BCI technologies.85 BCI could also be used for more efficient engagement with AI to help maintain human oversight over operational decisions within a compressed time frame. Some scholars have hypothesized that an AI-enabled battlefield could lead to a phase shift in warfare in which the tempo of operations outpaces the speed of human decisionmaking. Some Chinese scholars have referred to this as a battlefield singularity. 86 Some U.S. scholars have referred to this concept as hyperwar.