AIMight Technology Tip the Global Scales?
Benjamin Chang, a fourth-year MIT graduate student, is assessing the impacts of artificial intelligence on military power, with a focus on the U.S. and China. “Every issue critical to world order — whether climate change, terrorism, or trade — is clearly and closely intertwined with U.S.-China relations,” says Chang. “Competition between these nations will shape all outcomes anyone cares about in the next 50 years or more.”
The United States and China seem locked in an ever-tightening embrace, superpowers entangled in a web of economic and military concerns. “Every issue critical to world order — whether climate change, terrorism, or trade — is clearly and closely intertwined with U.S.-China relations,” says Benjamin Chang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in political science concentrating in international relations and security studies. “Competition between these nations will shape all outcomes anyone cares about in the next 50 years or more.”
Little surprise, then, that Chang is homing in on this relationship for his thesis, which broadly examines the impact of artificial intelligence on military power. As China and the United States circle each other as rivals and uneasy partners on the global stage, Chang hopes to learn what the integration of artificial intelligence in different domains might mean for the balance of power.
“There is a set of questions related to how technology will be used in the world in general, where the U.S. and China are the two actors with the most influence,” says Chang. “I want to know, for instance, how AI will affect strategic stability between them.”
The Nuclear Balance
In the domain of military power, one question Chang has been pursuing is whether the use of AI in nuclear strategy offers a battlefield advantage. “For the U.S., the main issue involves locating China’s elusive mobile missile launchers,” Chang says. “The U.S. has satellite and other remote sensors that provide too much intelligence for human analysts, but AI, with its image classifiers based on deep learning, could sort through all this data to locate Chinese assets in a timely fashion.”
While Chang’s data draws on publicly available information about each side’s military capabilities, these sources can’t provide specific numbers for China’s nuclear arsenal. “We don’t know if China has 250 or 300 nukes, so I design programs to run combat simulations with high and low numbers of weapons to try and isolate the effects of AI on combat outcomes.” Chang credits J. Chappell Lawson, Vipin Narang, and Eric Heginbotham — his advisors in international relations and security studies — for helping shape his research methodology.
