Artificial Intelligence in Digital Warfare: Introducing the Concept of the Cyberteammate
By Rudy Guyonneau, Arnaud Le Dez
| November 15, 2019
Technology changes our world at such a rapid pace that our natural, human intelligence has a hard time coping with its brutally disruptive evolution. The transformations of digital technologies have made deep and lasting impacts on our societies. Information, which is at the heart of the last century’s technological developments, has become such an essential resource that it is now a component of power. Information exchanges have sped up and intensified, which has resulted in a loss of culture as societies have become more uniform. Cyberspace, which appeared in the blink of a geologic eye, has become a favored way to communicate because of its ease, accessibility, and global range.
Despite advances in technology, humans remain the same at their core. Cyberspace has become a confrontational place where ideas and wills oppose themselves. Alternate “truths” have found a way to express themselves unrestingly there, thus producing discord. Unlike the dream of the generation that created it, cyberspace is not a world of peace and of universal harmony. Because this new, digital world can also carry the expression of an adversarial will, it thereby becomes mandatory to manifest oneself there, in order to fight it. From now on, one must be in capacity to take action in cyberspace, to act upon information if not on the means to process it. And sometimes, to impose one’s will, one must move towards war. While an actual war has yet to occur, the military is already engaged in digital warfare. At first, cyberfighters acted independently, but are now integrated into the combat forms of the land, sea, air, and space domains. It is the cyberfighter’s duty to support and augment physical battles in those domains. Cyberfighters, in contrast to their military brethren, can sustain a form of permanent conflict against non-state political entities without ever having to declare war. Digital warfare is indeed a long-haul fight, with the objective of weakening adversaries in cyberspace to win an advantage in military, economic, political or societal spaces.
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