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The AI Push Is Reigniting the Battle for the Soul of the US Academy
The moment requires greater public pushback against the military conquest of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers.
Oct 01, 2024
The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.
Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.
In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding.
And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.
The Pentagon Goes to School
Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: Two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.
In 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.
Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics—weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.
“I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”
Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.
In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically Black college.
Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.
For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.
A Science of Death or for Life?
Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”
The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.
James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded.
Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.
A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.
Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture
The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.
The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.
Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”
The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.
That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.
Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)
Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”
Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.
The Future of American Science
Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.
The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.
Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to Earth?
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Sunday Was Earth's Hottest Day on Record
"We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years," one expert said.
Jul 23, 2024
July 21 was Earth's hottest day on record, overtaking the record set last July during the
hottest year in millennia.
The European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) found that Sunday's average air surface temperature soared to 17.09°C , or 62.76°F, according to preliminary data. While that is only 0.1°C warmer than the previous record—set on July 6, 2023—it was nearly 0.3°C higher than the pre-2023 record, set at 16.8°C on August 13, 2016.
"What is truly staggering is how large the difference is between the temperature of the last 13 months and the previous temperature records," C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement. "We are now in truly uncharted territory and as the climate keeps warming, we are bound to see new records being broken in future months and years."
The news follows a year of shattered temperature records as El Niño combined with the climate emergency to heat air and ocean to levels well above average. While El Niño conditions ended in April, scientists still predict that 2024 could overtake 2023 as the hottest year on record.
As of June 2024, the past 13 months have all been the hottest of their kind on record. June 2024 was also the 12th month in a row to see its average temperature meet or surpass 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—the most ambitious temperature goal enshrined in the Paris agreement.
Scientists have warned that the only way to keep global temperatures from rising further is to rapidly phase out the use of oil, gas, and coal and transition to renewable energy.
"These recurring record-breaking temperatures are a scorching red flag, but it's not too late to reverse course."
Before Sunday, the last hottest day on record was July 6, 2023, which was also the fourth consecutive day to break that record. The previous record was set at 17.08°C, or 62.74°F, according to Copernicus. However, since the 2016 temperature record was first broken on July 3, 2023, 57 days in the past year have also surpassed it.
What's more, C3S found that the last 10 years have been the 10 years on record with the highest average daily temperatures.
"The difference in the highest daily average temperature between the lowest ranked of those 10 years (2015) and the previous record before 2023 (13 August 2016) was 0.2°C. The jump from the 2016 record to 2023/2024 is about 0.3°C, highlighting how substantial the warmth of 2023 and 2024," C3S said.
Record-breaking temperatures have also brought extreme weather.
On Sunday, Florida meteorologist Jeff Berardelli wrote on social media that "the most anomalously warm places were Antarctica and Western Canada where several hundred wildfires blaze, many out of control."
C3S also said that Sunday's record was in part driven by "much-above-average temperatures over large parts of Antarctica."
The warmest day on record also coincided with heatwaves in Russia, Europe, and the U.S., Reutersreported.
C3S predicted that temperatures would continue to rise in the short term.
"In the coming days, we are expecting the daily global average temperature to further increase and peak around 22 or 23 July 2024 and then go down, but with possible further fluctuations in the coming weeks," the agency said.
In the longer term, temperature trends will depend on whether policymakers can take ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and halt the destruction of natural carbon sinks.
"These recurring record-breaking temperatures are a scorching red flag, but it's not too late to reverse course," Oceana Campaign director Joseph Gordon said in a statement. "When you're on the path to destruction, the best thing you can do is turn around."
Gordon recommended one thing U.S. President Joe Biden in particular could do to stop runaway climate change.
"One of the most immediate and impactful ways to address greenhouse gas emissions is to prevent new offshore drilling in the United States," Gordon said. "Offshore drilling drives climate change throughout its entire process. President Biden must permanently protect our coasts from offshore drilling and move us toward a clean energy future."
An earlier version of this article misstated the difference between the new temperature record and the pre-2023 record.
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The Dangerous Politics of Climate Engineering
The idea that humans can manipulate the Earth to reduce the risks of climate change relies on and perpetuates a futile sense of human control and domination over our planet.
Jul 21, 2024
Climate scientists around the world are now projecting warming of at least 2.5°C within this century. As U.S. and other wealthy governments fail to phase out fossil fuels, investments in climate engineering—technological interventions to manipulate the climate—have been increasing.
We’re seeing this play out in real time in Massachusetts. This August, a team of researchers plans to dump 6,600 gallons of sodium hydroxide into ocean waters just south of Martha’s Vineyard. Next summer, they intend to dump a staggering 66,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine. They call it the “LOC-NESS” experiment, and it’s intended to test a new geoengineering technique called “ocean alkalinity enhancement.” They plan to make ocean waters less acidic, causing them to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They hope if alkaline substances were dumped at truly massive scales it could offset a portion of human caused emissions.
There are many serious concerns with manipulating the ocean environment in an attempt to address climate change. Sodium hydroxide is a dangerous substance that causes chemical burns on contact with humans or marine life. The dumping locations are home to at least eight endangered species, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. This experiment will alter the ocean environment, creating new risks to many already threatened marine species.
Rather than supporting manipulations of Earth’s systems, humanity needs to deploy existing solutions that center ecological integrity, environmental justice, and human rights.
Dozens of reputable studies also cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of ocean alkalinity enhancement. At least two gigatons of alkaline material would have to be dumped continuously by every bulk carrier and cargo ship in the world in order to capture only 4% of current CO2 emissions. Additionally, mining on the scale the project requires, as well as transporting the mined materials to ships for dumping, likely causes more greenhouse gasses to be emitted than it removes from the atmosphere after it’s dumped in the ocean.
The idea that humans can manipulate the Earth to reduce the risks of climate change relies on and perpetuates a futile sense of human control and domination over our planet. This false sense of control emerges directly from the technological optimism of billionaires who are enthusiastically advocating for more geoengineering research, like those funding the LOC-NESS project. In addition to wasting money that could instead be used to fund wind and solar projects already proven to reduce emissions, climate engineering diverts attention away from the equitable phaseout of fossil fuels that is urgently needed to avoid further climate catastrophe.
The scientists involved in the LOC-NESS experiment say they are not advocating for immediate deployment of marine geoengineering—just to develop the technologies and information that society may need in the future if we do decide to geoengineer. However, the history of multiple technological advances shows that after a technology is developed, the scientists involved lose control over what happens next. This disconnect is clearly demonstrated in the film Oppenheimer, when the U.S. military comes to transport the nuclear bomb away from Los Alamos. In a telling moment, Oppenheimer asks to be kept up-to-date about when the technology will be used. The military general responds with a clear message—the job of the Los Alamos scientists is done and they will no longer be involved. As the saying goes, history tends to repeat itself.
Despite the powerful influence of those advocating for climate engineering, concerned citizens around the world are mobilizing against it. The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has established an effective moratorium on geoengineering, making exceptions only for small-scale research projects conducted in a controlled environment—which the LOC-NESS experiment is not. Indigenous People in particular have led resistance to many geoengineering experiments, which frequently target Indigenous lands for deployment.
Rather than supporting manipulations of Earth’s systems, humanity needs to deploy existing solutions that center ecological integrity, environmental justice, and human rights. Recognizing that climate chaos is a symptom, and not the core problem, is essential for effective transformative change. We must oppose projects like LOC-NESS and focus on guiding our world toward a healthy, just, and sustainable future.
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