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Intelligent Autonomous Things on the Battlefield 49

Fig. 3.2 Networks of opponents will fight each other with cyber and electromagnetic
attacks of great diversity and volume; most such offensive and defensive actions will be
performed by autonomous cyber agents.

Clearly, these requirements imply a high degree of intelligence on the
part of the things. Particularly important is the necessity to operate in a
highly adversarial environment, i.e., an intentionally hostile and not merely
randomly dangerous world. The intelligent things will have to constantly
think about an intelligent adversary that strategizes to deceive and defeat
them. Without this adversarial intelligence, the battle things will not survive
long enough to be Fig. 3.1.

3.2 THE CHALLENGES OF AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCE
ON THE BATTLEFIELD
The vision—or rather, the emerging reality—of the battlefield populated by
intelligent things portends a multitude of profound challenges. The use of
artificial intelligence (AI) for battlefield tasks has been explored on multiple
occasions (e.g., Rasch, Kott, & Forbus, 2002), and though it makes things
individually and collectively more intelligent, it also makes the battlefield
harder to understand and manage. Human warfighters have to face a much
more complex, more unpredictable world where things have a mind of their
own and perform actions that may appear inexplicable to humans. Direct
control of such intelligent things becomes impossible or limited to cases
of decisions about whether to take a specific destructive action.
On the other hand, humans complicate the life for intelligent things.
Humans and things think differently. Intelligent things, in the foreseeable
future, will be challenged in understanding and anticipating human intent,
goals, lines of reasoning, and decisions. Humans and things will remain
largely opaque to each other and yet, things will be expected to perceive,