The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
The age of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived, and many national security agencies are looking at the daunting road ahead for their digital transformation journeys as they seek to bolster their capabilities with AI technology. Emerging AI approaches such as Deep Learning have the potential to enable the development and deployment of previously unimaginable capabilities across intelligence and national security domains. Despite this potential, significant obstacles remain and may hinder initiatives to incorporate AI at the center of intelligence and national security capabilities.
Please join Intelligence Project Fellow Rohan Samaraweera to discuss the potential impacts of AI and related technologies on the global intelligence and national security community.
Rohan Samaraweera is a Recanati-Kaplan Fellow at Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from the Australian National Intelligence Community (NIC). Rohan joined the Australian Signals Directorate as a Sigint development analyst in 2000. Since then he has worked in a range of technical collection and analysis roles, including secondments to other NIC collection agencies and overseas partners. Since 2016, Rohan has been working at the Australian Department of Home Affairs to establish a data discovery team applying artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches to homeland security issues.
