As a military veteran, U.S. Congressman Seth Moulton sees the potential of artificial intelligence for the United States.
He also sees the dangers AI poses when it’s in the hands of our adversaries.
“I don’t think Congress is ever going to keep up with the industry when it comes to regulating it and therefore we should not focus on regulating the industry as a whole, but rather focus on the edge cases – the most dangerous potential uses of AI – and to focus our time and resources on ensuring the safety of this new technology,” Moulton said in an interview with MassLive.
One of the biggest concerns Moulton has over AI is its use in military warfare. Although the U.S. Congressman acknowledges how the new-age technology can benefit troops on the battlefield, he also fears that the United States’ sluggishness to embrace AI will make us vulnerable to our adversaries who’ve already gotten a headstart.
“Today our adversaries are adopting AI faster than we are, and they are showing less concern for how it gets used,” Moulton wrote in an op-ed for the Boston Globe in May. “If America falls short in this new AI arms race, someone else will set the moral guardrails for its use. And once that happens, it will be very difficult to pull back.”
As one of the leading figures in the House Armed Services Committee, Moulton has pushed the Department of Defense to faster adopt AI technology. According to The Future of Defense Task Force, a report Moulton authored in 2020, the U.S. needs to adopt emerging technologies such as AI to compete with countries like China and Russia, who pose both economic and national security threats.
But Moulton isn’t the only politician worried about America dragging its feet when it comes to adopting AI technology. In an op-ed to the Washington Examiner, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio pointed out that some of the United States’ adversaries – China, Iran and the Kremlin – have already begun to use AI technology.
The Florida senator predicts with the use of complex AI technology, each of these countries could sow propaganda or even mimic government leaders.
“We can and should do better,” Rubio wrote. “The U.S. must lead the world in adapting to the AI future and partner with technological trailblazers to make the free world more resilient to foreign influence campaigns. And policymakers must put America’s long-term interests over short-term party politics.”
On Friday, the House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual bill that set the policy for the Pentagon. Weeks before the Senate passes its own version of the bill later this month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) has filed over a dozen amendments that would prohibit the use of AI in the military, including in nuclear launch decisions.
“Seventy-eight years ago this weekend, Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the world’s first nuclear weapons explosion,” Sen. Markey said in a statement. “In 2023, we face a new kind of nuclear threat: the militarization of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems. We must pass legislation to keep AI away from the nuclear button before it’s too late.”
Although the Department of Defense updated its autonomous weapons directive earlier this year to follow its AI ethics principles, Moulton said that the U.S. needs both domestic and international agreements around the use of AI.
“This is the place where we really have to have some big thinking on, like a Geneva convention or something,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing that we need to do.”
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