Current Affairs –  AI Ethics is a hot topic in the artificial intelligence world. It features in keynote speeches at major conferences and spawns entire dedicated safety teams at large companies—all the while, government, industry and academic leaders make a point of how hard they’re working to make sure AI proceeds in an ethical way. Ostensibly, this is a response to well-founded fears about the technology’s possible (and proven) downsides, like its threat to the job market, or potential for harm in mental health settings.

But these conversations omit an honest consideration of the scariest application of all: the use of artificial intelligence to build weapons. AI’s use in the military doesn’t receive as much media attention as other industries, but that does not mean it isn’t happening. And if AI is really so capable that it threatens to replace our livelihoods, how much more threatening is it to imagine that same capability directed deliberately  at causing death and destruction?

Such capability is, as of right now, in its nascent stages. The large majority of Earth’s existing weaponry has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. But the US and, insofar as one can tell, China, are betting that the next generation of weapons will. AI could soon reshape military power in several key areas, including intelligence analysis, vehicle guidance and control, and target acquisition–all areas where machine learning has improved significantly in recent years.

Drones are an obvious application for AI guidance and control, but in order to be deployed there, AI still needs to solve some further technical challenges.  Firstly, it needs to become more functional on constrained hardware—meaning devices with limited battery life and processing power (see: drones, which only have enough energy to remain in flight for about 30 minutes, and can therefore only allocate a small percentage of power to data processing).