“I’m not as confident that we can clearly delineate between offensive and defensive weapons, in general,” said Paul Scharre, a weapons analyst at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based policy group. “If there was an easy way to do that, nations would have agreed long ago to only build ‘defensive’ weapons.” Despite skepticism among some in the tech community, the Pentagon has played a key role in one of the best-known examples of A.I., the self-driving vehicle concepts now championed by companies like Google and Uber. Beginning in 2004, Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, tried to speed progress in autonomous vehicles by hosting a series of three autonomous vehicle “Grand Challenges.” The effort set off a wave of commercial research and development, but it fell short of a goal to remove United States soldiers from hazardous roles on the battlefield. Military contractors say that self-driving technology has now advanced to the point where a human soldier could sit in the driver’s seat in the last vehicle in a truck convoy, safely controlling a series of vehicles. Despite technology demonstrations, however, the American military has not yet committed to converting existing trucks to such a system. Mr. Carter’s background could provide him with cachet among Silicon Valley’s tech elite. He received a doctorate in theoretical physics from Oxford University and has been a lecturer at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a visiting fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, just a few miles from where he gave his speech on Wednesday. In addition to changing the reporting structure of the DIUx group, which occupies a sprawling facility opposite a NASA wind tunnel and adjacent to Silicon Valley’s busy Highway 101, Mr. Carter pointed to a range of initiatives that he was undertaking in an effort to make the Defense Department’s culture more like that of Silicon Valley. “We’re taking a page straight from the Silicon Valley playbook, we’re iterating rapidly to make DIUx even better,” he said. Borrowing a bit of tech industry lingo, he said the Pentagon planned to create additional organizations in other regions of the country that the Defense Department considered to be “innovation hubs.” He said the next office would be opened in the Boston area, another hotbed of A.I. research centered on Harvard and M.I.T. “I’ve been pushing the Pentagon to think outside our five-sided box and invest aggressively in change and innovation,” he said, adding that the Defense Department’s proposed research and development budget for the 2017 fiscal year was more than double the combined R.&D. spending of Apple, Google and Intel in the last year.
Under Defense, which aims to compensate a smaller military for larger technology, the US Secretary of the Ministry of Defence's 'Third Offset', Ashton B. Carter, has made a fourth visit to Silicon Valley while Deputy Secretary of Defence, Robert O. Work has emphasised the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) tech in creating new 'Iron Man" style fighters. It would appear however, young Silicon Valley executives have shown little interest in seeing their technology used for military purposes, questioning the difference between offensive and defensive uses of smart weapons. AI specialist at University of California, Berkeley, Stuart J Russell stated, "We need to figure out where to draw the line and we need to stay on the right side of it." Still, the Pentagon remains a key investor in the tech community, taking up the likes of self-automated vehicles, and Carter's doctorate in theoretical physics may help to initiate a successful alliance between the tech world and military defence.