Lawfare Daily: Nuclear Weapons in the Age of AI, with Joshua Keating
7/9/202643 min
For today's episode, Lawfare Senior Editor Scott R. Anderson sits down with Vox Senior Correspondent Joshua Keating to discuss his special new series on how artificial intelligence is impacting the use and development of nuclear weapons. Together, they explore what AI may mean for nuclear command and control moving forward, how it is impacting nuclear arms development, how these trends are intersecting the breakdown of the global nonproliferation regime, and what it all means for the risk of nuclear escalation moving forward.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJoshua Keating· Guest0:00
[upbeat music] You know, at a certain point, what does it actually mean to have a human in the loop if the human is getting all their information from AI and, and their decisions are being influenced by it? Are we really that comforted by the fact that it's ultimately a human being whose finger is on the button?
Scott R. Anderson· Host0:18
It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm senior editor Scott R. Anderson with Joshua Keating, senior correspondent at Vox.
Joshua Keating· Guest0:27
When you talk about AI and nuclear weapons, it's, it's, it's the nuclear weapons you should be worried about more than the AI, and that the same tools, political, technological, that, you know, have kept us from blowing ourselves up, uh, for the last eighty years, I think we can continue to apply those, uh, even in this new world of artificial intelligence.
Scott R. Anderson· Host0:50
Today, we're talking about nuclear weapons in the age of artificial intelligence. So Josh, you spent the last several months writing a series about what I think is in some ways the most cinematic, the most widely discussed fear of AI, and this is the idea of AI intersecting with nuclear technology.
Joshua Keating· Guest1:13
Mm-hmm.
Scott R. Anderson· Host1:14
AI taking control of nuclear weapons, the thing that we all think of as the most destructive force that humanity has developed and still uses, still has available to it, or, or at least to many states, including here in the United States. And it's interesting because