Defense Intel Chief Worried About Chinese ‘Integration of Human and Machines’

The future of human performance is a research race, and the U.S. shouldn’t take its lead for granted, the DIA director says.

The U.S. military’s top intelligence officer is increasingly worried about China’s research into “human performance enhancement,” including efforts to merge human and machine intelligence.

It’s a “key area” of disruptive technology that will affect national security, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, told an audience at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Chinese efforts to teach machines to think — through emerging technologies like neural nets, a form of artificial intelligence — represent phases of a process that concludes with “the next step, the integration of human and machines,” Ashley said. This, he said, could result in “cognitive advances not just in how we think, but [also] think about the stamina of the individual soldier; think about the ethical impacts of those kind of technologies and how they would be applied? And how does a democracy view those type of technologies? How will Russia and China leverage those?”

This, he said, would lead to “hard decisions” for the U.S.

Read the full article at Defense One.