Inna Varenytsia/Reuters
Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to help its forces select targets for air strikes worries A.I. skeptics and human-rights advocates. A targeting A.I. is only as smart as the people who trained it—and those people are prone to dropping bombs in the wrong places, these experts warned. All that is to say, Israel’s A.I. air strikes risk further endangering civilians in Gaza.
A thousand miles away, however, A.I. could help outnumbered Ukrainian troops hold off the invading Russian army. Self-teaching targeting algorithms, installed in nimble quadcopter drones, could solve a serious problem that has plagued Ukraine’s drone operations. Stung by the Ukrainians’ successful deployment of small explosives-laden drones, the Russians have begun installing radio-jamming electronic-warfare gear—“E.W.” in military parlance—on vehicles all along the 600-mile front of Russia’s 22-month wider war on Ukraine.
These jammers can block the signals that connect Ukraine’s numerous first-person view (FPV) drones to their operators, hunkering down miles away, seeing what the drone sees through their virtual-reality headsets. When an FPV drone loses its signal, it might fly off course—and miss whatever tank, artillery piece, or bunker the operator was aiming it at.