Artificial Intelligence (Formerly Emerging Technologies) –
When Bernard Baruch called for the establishment of a “little school…to preserve experience and keep touch with industry” after World War I, he could not have imagined the world that faculty and students of the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy would study a century later. Advances in technology have changed perceptions of what industries are necessary for the preservation of the common defense and pursuit of the U.S. national security objectives. As part of the current curriculum, today’s Eisenhower students are assigned to one of eighteen seminars, each tasked with studying a specific industry relevant to national security. This paper represents the culmination of a semester’s work of the Emerging Technology (ET) Industry Study seminar.
ET is not really an industry, per se, rather it is an umbrella under which many new and developing ideas incubate before they ripen into common use. During the spring semester, the 2020 ET Industry Study examined many aspects of an array of technologies. Some of these will be discussed briefly below, but none are more central, or have more potential to change the world, than AI. Recognizing this, the ET Industry Study partnered with the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) to help guide our studies and to produce scholarship that we hope will help to inform national security professionals on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that AI brings.
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