The Maven Smart System and the Future of Military AI

Both military practitioners and scholars believe that artificial intelligence will influence the character of war in the future. But it’s difficult to know how it will do so exactly, particularly as we look further and further into the future. Much of what we learn about that future will come from experimentation that yields lessons not just about the tools that will become increasingly important in future military operations, but the way that militaries develop them. That makes the recent experience of the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps, which operationalized an AI-enabled software called the Maven Smart System, instructive. Emmy Probasco and Igor Mikolic-Torreira of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology had direct access to observe this innovation project, and they join this episode to extract and explore those lessons.   The MWI Podcast is produced with the generous support of the West Point Class of 1974.