AIBelief in AI as a 'Great Machine' Could Weaken National Security Crisis Responses: Study
New research indicated that emergency management and national security professionals were more hesitant and doubtful of their abilities when faced with completely AI-driven threats.
Artificial intelligence designed to influence our decisions is everywhere — in Google searches, in online shopping suggestions and in movie streaming recommendations. But how does it affect decision-making in moments of crisis?
Virginia Commonwealth University researcher Christopher Whyte, Ph.D., investigated how emergency management and national security professionals responded during simulated AI attacks. The results reveal that the professionals were more hesitant and doubtful of their abilities when faced with completely AI-driven threats than when confronted with threats from human hackers or hackers who were only assisted by AI.
“These results show that AI plays a major role in driving participants to become more hesitant, more cautious,” he said, “except under fairly narrow circumstances.”
Those narrow circumstances are most concerning to Whyte, an associate professor in VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.
National security organizations design their training programs to cut down on hesitancy in moments of uncertainty. While most of the almost 700 American and European professionals in the study thought AI could boost human abilities, a small group believed AI could eventually fully replace their profession, and human expertise in general. That group responded recklessly to the AI-based threat, accepting risks and rashly forging ahead.
“These are people that believe the totality of what they do — their professional mission and the institutional mission that they support — could be overtaken by AI,” Whyte said.
Artificial Intelligence: The Next “Great Machine”
Whyte has a theory for why that may be the case.
The discredited “Great Man” theory proposes that the course of history has mainly been shaped by strong political figures, while modern historians give more credit to popular movements. Now, Whyte proposes that history has also been shaped by transformative technological inventions, like the telegraph or radio waves, and misplaced faith in their power — what he has coined the “Great Machine” theory.
But unlike the “Great Man” theory, Whyte said, “Great Machines” are a shared, societal force that can be harnessed for society’s benefit – or for its detriment.
“In the mid-1930s, for instance, we knew that radio waves had a great amount of potential for a lot of things,” Whyte said. “But one of the early ideas was for death rays — you could fry your brain, and so on.”
