EXISTENTIAL TERRORISMAssessing the Risks of Existential Terrorism and AI
Professor Gary Ackerman, associate dean at the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC) at SUNY-Albany, recently published an article, “Existential Terrorism: Can Terrorists Destroy Humanity?” which he co-authored with Zachary Kallenborn of CSIS. The article explores the plausibility of terrorist organizations using emerging technologies such as AI to enact existential harm, including human extinction.
Gary Ackerman, an associate professor and associate dean at the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity (CEHC), has spent decades studying terrorism around the world — from the motivations and capabilities of terrorist groups to the mitigation strategies governments use to defend against them.
Last month, Ackerman published an article in the European Journal of Risk Regulation that gained a substantial amount of media attention: “Existential Terrorism: Can Terrorists Destroy Humanity?” The paper, which Ackerman co-authored with Zachary Kallenborn of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), explores the plausibility of terrorist organizations using emerging technologies such as AI to enact existential harm, including human extinction.
Recently, a shorter version of the article, including various illustrative scenarios, was published by the Irregular Warfare Initiative. News outlets such as Forbes and Newsweek have highlighted the research.
Ackerman has headed more than 10 large government-sponsored research projects over the past five years to address counterterrorism policy and operations, and has testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security about terrorist motivations for using nuclear weapons. He is also a senior investigator and co-founder of the nation’s first Center for Advanced Red Teaming (CART) housed at CEHC.
We caught up with Ackerman to learn more about existential terrorism and the threats it poses, what’s being done to prevent the use of AI as a weapon, and why he found it necessary to publish an article about this topic now.
J. T. Stone: How Do You Define Existential Terrorism?
Gary Ackerman:We define existential terrorism as terrorism that will cause sufficient harm to the continuation of humanity, either by wiping out the population completely or reducing it to an unviable quantity. Another understanding of existential risk that we discuss is the prevention of human flourishing, in which the human species gets stuck in a cycle where it cannot grow, such as in a global totalitarian society that oppresses all of mankind. But for the purposes of our research, we define existential terrorism as terrorism that brings about (or comes close to bringing about) human extinction.
