Digital Flashpoint: AI and Strategic Stability

Abstract: How will artificial intelligence affect strategic stability—whether states go to war and whether those wars go nuclear?  Pundits and practitioners proclaim the revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence for intelligence, targeting, allocation of weapons, and even lethality.  However, as AI changes military power, it also has implications for strategic stability.  Early warning, nuclear stability, and incentives for first strike are all impacted by how AI is developed, tested, integrated, and applied to military power.  What efforts are already being taken by the US military and what can militaries do to ensure that embracing the AI revolution doesn’t lead to strategic instability?

Dr. Jacquelyn Schneider is the Hargrove Hoover Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Director of the Hoover Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative, and an affiliate with Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, national security, and political psychology with a special interest in cybersecurity, autonomous technologies, wargames, and Northeast Asia. She is the author of Hand Behind Unmanned (Oxford University Press) and is a frequent contributor to scholarly journals and policy outlets.  She was previously an Assistant Professor at the Naval War College as well as a senior policy advisor to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Before beginning her academic career, she spent six years as an Air Force officer in South Korea and Japan and is currently a reservist assigned to US Space Systems Command. She has a BA from Columbia University, MA from Arizona State University, and PhD from George Washington University.

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