AI for Peace

1AI AND CONFLICT PREDICTIONOUR REACH EXCEEDING OUR GRASP

DOI: 10.1201/9781003359982-2

Since at least Nostradamus in the sixteenth century, the possibility of predicting the onset of war has ignited the imagination in the hope that people could therefore prevent it. Books, television, and movies have unleashed multiple visions of a super-human AI so powerful that it could predict patterns of human behavior accurately—and that they could then eliminate threats to peace. The idea of “AI for peace” includes dark examples, like Ultron in the twenty-first century Marvel movies, in which a “peacekeeping” AI turns on humanity, and the AI in the television series Westworld, which predicts the behavior of individual humans in order to eliminate violence—but ...