Peter Suciu
“Shall we play a game?” Readers of a certain age will instantly recognize the line from the classic 1983 movie WarGames, about a computer hacker named David Lightman (played by Matthew Broderick) who nearly initiates a nuclear war with the Soviet Union after accessing a United States military supercomputer. To NORAD’s War Operations Plan Response (WOPR) computer, “Global Thermonuclear War” was a game like chess, checkers, or poker.
In the four decades since the movie, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a reality—yet is still poorly understood and acts in ways that its developers struggle to explain. With that in mind, understanding how AI platforms “think” about using the nuclear option offers a vital glimpse into their capabilities, and to what extent they can be trusted with the future of the human race. According to a recently published white paper, “AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crises,” authored by Kenneth Payne of King’s College London, the answers might not be good.
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