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FT Alphaville doesn’t write extensively about the military, probably the only walk of life in which people abuse jargon and acronyms more than finance.
Still, word reached us from military think-tank RUSI’s two-day Land Warfare Conference, which is taking place today and tomorrow.
Today’s keynote speaker was Roly Walker, also known as General Sir Roly Walker KCB DSO ADC Gen, head of the British Army.
Walker came to talk about how the army is upgrading its capabilities, leading to one of the most chilling obligatory AI mentions we’ve recently seen:
With edge processing we’ve integrated AI into existing equipment such as our Bowman radios, reducing packet size and prioritising the flow of data for targeting purposes, increasing by an order of magnitude our lethality.
The real diamond, however, lies in a section about robotics (our emphasis):
The case for integrating greater autonomy and more robotics into our fighting system is well understood, but to unlock the extraordinary power they offer, we have to digitise our system deeper and wider than we’re doing at the moment, which is why I could not be more pleased to see the commitment of at least £1Bn for a Digital Targeting Web. We will soon get the data moving horizontally not just vertically, at light speed, with a precision focus on the defeat mechanisms to an adversary’s fighting system, from top to bottom, from back to front, from the fundamentals of how they build it, to the frontlines where they might use it. Corrosion and erosion from within, not just explosion from without.
The finance world has a lot of catching up to do.