The new superweapons of the 21st century will not be atomic or thermonuclear bombs, but self-learning systems of artificial intelligence, which are already being developed by the world's leading powers. French futurist Jean-Christophe Boni said this at a press conference at Kaspersky Lab dedicated to the Kaspersky Geek Picnic festival.
“Nelson Mandela wrote in 1995 that the main weapon of the 21st century will be education, which will replace nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction of the 20th century. In fact, it seems to me, they will be artificial intelligence systems - for their operation, unlike an atomic bomb, they do not need uranium, or factories, or other hard-to-find things, but only silicon and electricity,”said the French researcher.
As the scientist notes, the very fact of creating or developing artificial intelligence systems cannot be traced, just as the IAEA and other nuclear agencies track traces of uranium, plutonium or other radionuclides near secret facilities in North Korea or Iran. Therefore, the appearance of such a "superweapon" will be extremely difficult or even impossible to predict.
“Politicians and law enforcement officials in France, Israel and many other countries deny that they are developing such systems for cyber warfare. Whether this is really so, we simply cannot verify. But it seems to me that these developments are underway, and this is the main strategic task for most of the leading powers,”the scientist continues.
If this weapon is being created, then why is it not being used yet? As explained by Anton Shingarev, vice president of Kaspersky Lab, NATO countries consider cyberattacks to be the equivalent of a physical attack and reserve the right to respond to such a threat in any way.
In addition, cyber weapons will also make the attacker vulnerable, since modern industrial and military facilities use approximately the same equipment, operating on similar principles and connected to the same global network. Accordingly, the victim of a cyber attack can study what was attacked and respond in the same way, and this makes such attacks at the state level meaningless.