By Francis X. Maier
History buffs may recall the case of Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02). For those who don’t: it was a high-level military simulation conducted a couple of decades ago by the now-defunct U.S. Joint Forces Command. Billed as “the key to military transformation,” it cost about $250 million—an enormous outlay for such an exercise at the time. The premise of the drill was an armed conflict with a rogue state in the Persian Gulf.
Blue Team was a combined U.S. force testing the concept of RDO, “Rapid Decisive Operations.” It was based on the doctrine of “network-centric warfare” and supported by a wide array of information technologies, analytical tools, and electronic sensors.
Red Team, the bad guys, was largely the work of a single man: retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper. He was given complete freedom to run his side of the conflict.
The war game began, and Red Team promptly sank an aircraft carrier, several cruisers, and much of the Blue fleet with low-tech swarm attacks. In the first two days of the exercise, it killed thousands of simulated U.S. service members. It also repeatedly evaded Blue Team surveillance through unconventional, unpredictable tactics and by exploiting Blue’s technical vulnerabilities.
Red Team did so well that the simulation was halted, restarted, and, according to a very public and very angry Van Riper, forced to conform to a computer-projected framework and outcome that favored Blue Team.
The military disputed parts of Van Riper’s account, but MC02 remains a lasting embarrassment and a lesson about the cost of our addiction to technology. Worse, it is a lesson only half learned. Today, 24 years later, our technologies—and especially AI—are far more sophisticated, powerful, and precise. They are also more expensive. And they still have technical vulnerabilities. They can do far more damage in war. But they cannot, by themselves, destroy a determined, low-tech adversary—no matter how evil the enemy or how deserved the punishment.
Iran is Exhibit A.
High-tech weaponry, however “smart,” never replaces mature, morally formed human command. It is true that killing an enemy at a distance enhances one’s own safety. But it also makes the act of killing more impersonal and the decision to kill much easier. Autonomous combat drones choosing their own targets is not an edifying idea. Yet that reality is already part of today’s battlefield.
The point is this: the more advanced our tools become, the more they become a double-edged sword. George Parkin Grant, the great Canadian Christian philosopher, observed that North American civilization is addicted to technology in a unique way that resembles a secular religion. This stems from the European settlers of the continent and their Calvinist roots, emptied of their original Christian framework.
At bottom, we are a people of conquest: the conquest and remaking of nature, including human nature. That explains our genius for innovation and tools. But as we use our tools, they use and reshape us, and it all ends in a kind of hubris that involves blindness to nature, rejection of limits, skepticism toward anything “sacred,” and bondage to the power of technique. It does not have to be this way. We can choose otherwise. But too often, and too easily, we walk sleepily toward catastrophe.
MC02 reminds us of the cost of failing to see beyond our technology-dominated assumptions and the consequences that follow. That is why, when it comes to artificial intelligence, if we do not want a real-life version of Skynet, we can never dispense with rigorous human foresight or rigorous human control of AI, its development, and its applications.
AI is here and it is not going away. How, then, should we proceed? Scripture tells us dozens of times, “Do not be afraid.” It is not a suggestion. It is a command. There is a God; He loves us, and He is intimately involved in our affairs. Words like “apocalypse” and “crisis” pepper our public discourse about artificial intelligence, and they have a boogeyman effect that invites unwarranted fear. But in the original Greek, apocalypse simply means “revelation”: the discovery of some previously hidden fact or truth. And “crisis” comes from the Greek word krinein, meaning to decide or judge.
Despite our anxieties and past mistakes, there is nothing fatal, doomed, or inevitably catastrophic about the rise of AI. AI is a tool—a very powerful and problematic tool, but a tool nonetheless. God made us rational creatures with free will. We are not powerless. That means we must approach AI with the wisdom of experience and the clarity of morally faithful thought.
If we do so, the beneficial effects of AI for medicine, education, assistance to people with disabilities, and research in nearly every field will be enormous. And we need to do it urgently, because AI is likely to far exceed the social, political, cultural, and psychological impact of the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and any other profound reconfiguration of daily life that has preceded it. Consider the outcomes recounted in The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi and Reformations by Carlos Eire, and multiply their consequences.
We can take some (very) modest comfort in humanity’s experience with nuclear fission. We have had nuclear weapons for more than 80 years without using them. And that, despite ceaseless regional wars and periods of intense superpower rivalry. Of course, we had already incinerated 120,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and another 130,000 later died from their injuries. A memory like that burns prudence into the brain. With AI, we have not yet had any comparable devastating event. We still have time—though not much—to ensure we never do.
In the end, machines are not human, however intelligent they may seem and however easily we anthropomorphize them. Machines are not human, and they never can be. There is something precious and utterly unique about the nature of the human creature. We must remember it, affirm it, and defend it—even from ourselves, from our tools, and from our fantasies of somehow becoming little gods.
About the Author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.