This system rests on an elegant and terrifying symmetry, but it goes wobbly each time either side makes a new technological advance. After the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as victors of the Second World War, they looked set to take up arms in a third, a fate they avoided only by building an infrastructure of mutual assured destruction. There is precedent, of course, for the automation of Armageddon. At the deepest, most important level, an AI may not understand what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meant when they said, “A nuclear war cannot be won.” In complex, high-stakes adversarial situations, AI’s notions about what constitutes winning may be impenetrable, if not altogether alien. But today’s most advanced AIs are black boxes we don’t entirely understand how they work. “There is a wishful thinking about this technology,” Schneider said, “and my concern is that there will be this desire to use AI to decrease uncertainty by who don’t understand the uncertainty of the algorithms themselves.”ĪI offers an illusion of cool exactitude, especially in comparison to error-prone, potentially unstable humans. Players’ automation directives were not typically spelled out with an engineer’s precision-how exactly would this be done? Could any automated system even be put in place before the culmination of the crisis?-but the impulse is telling nonetheless. Schneider’s game is, by design, short and stressful. AI alone would decide whether to enter into a nuclear exchange. They advocated the empowerment of algorithms to determine when a nuclear counterstrike was appropriate. In many games, she said, players who feared a total breakdown of command and control wanted to automate their nuclear launch capability completely. But Schneider told me she was most unsettled by a different strategy, pursued with surprising regularity. Some players delegate launch authority to officers at missile sites, who must make their own judgments about whether a nuclear counterstrike is warranted-a scary proposition. There are no good options in this scenario. Any launch commands that he sends may not reach the officers responsible for carrying them out. The enemy has developed a new cyberweapon, and fresh intelligence suggests that it can penetrate the communication system that connects the president to his nuclear forces. The hawks advise immediate preparations for a retaliatory strike, but the Cabinet soon learns of a disturbing wrinkle.
The atmosphere in the Situation Room is charged. A territorial conflict has turned hot, and the enemy is mulling a nuclear first strike against the United States. president and his Cabinet have just been hustled into the basement of the West Wing to receive a dire briefing. Because nuclear brinkmanship has thankfully been historically rare, Schneider’s game gives us one of the clearest glimpses into the decisions that people might make in situations with the highest imaginable human stakes. It models a fast-unfolding nuclear conflict and has been played 115 times by the kinds of people whose responses are of supreme interest: former heads of state, foreign ministers, senior NATO officers. Jacquelyn Schneider, the director of the Wargaming and Crisis Simulation Initiative at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently told me about a game she devised in 2018. How far depends on our foresight as humans, and on our ability to act with collective restraint. How fast depends, in part, on how fast the technology advances, and it appears to be advancing quickly. But the same seductive logic that accelerated the nuclear arms race could, over a period of years, propel AI up the chain of command. No one is inviting AI to formulate grand strategy, or join a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the moment, that mostly means giving algorithms control over individual weapons or drone swarms. The world’s major military powers have begun a race to wire AI into warfare.
Just want to enjoy a friendly skirmish with your friends? Custom games let you try out new strategies with up to three friends in free-for-all or team-based matches.Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In addition replay feature, and spectator mode make it easy to enter the competitive scene. Mushroom Wars 2 comes tournament-ready, with a league system and ranked matches that make for fierce competition. Once you’re confident in your skills, putting your mushroom army against other players is the best way to improve. But the journey to become a fearsome commander requires fast reflexes, an eye for strategy, and the ability to oversee up to thousands of units at once. Learning the ropes of mushroom warfare is easy with simple and intuitive controls as well as gamepad support. Mushroom Wars 2 is an award-winning sequel to the critically acclaimed RTS hit built upon the core gameplay experience that made the original Mushroom Wars so enjoyable.
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