Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Automating deterrence makes it stronger
How Deterrence Works
The goal of deterrence is for the adversary to be sure that you can do Y and are willing to. A human decision point weakens that, because the person at the decision point might decide not to act.
Removing the Human
An automated foreign policy decision-making process removes the doubt. If the AI judges that the adversary is doing X, the response follows at once. Anything less leaves a human in the loop who might choose otherwise.
The Doomsday Machine
That puts a machine in charge of whether a country goes to war or uses nuclear weapons, the doomsday machine of old fiction, and it forces a hard look at how deterrence would play out when AI sits inside national security decisions.
How did the Soviets automate nuclear retaliation?
In the mid-1980s the Soviet Union built a system called Perimeter, known in the West as the Dead Hand. It was designed to detect signs of a nuclear attack, such as seismic shocks, radiation, and loss of communications, and then send launch orders by command rocket to surviving missiles. Journalist David Hoffman described it in his 2009 book The Dead Hand. Russian officials have said the system was still maintained after the Cold War.
How does removing options strengthen a threat?
Game theorist Thomas Schelling argued in his 1960 book The Strategy of Conflict that a party can gain strength by giving up its own choices. His example was a driver in a game of chicken who rips out the steering wheel and shows it to the other driver. The other driver knows a collision cannot be avoided by the first and must swerve. Schelling won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2005.
When has a human overridden a nuclear alarm?
On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning satellite system reported that American missiles had been launched. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the command center and judged the alert to be a false alarm. He did not pass it up the chain as a confirmed attack. The system had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile launches.
More from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
