Behind the drones in Ukraine is artificial intelligence, the key to the war of the future

The war in Eastern Europe appears to us to be fought as it was in the last century, between trenches and tanks. Yet the protagonists in the field are satellites and robots, the cyber warriors guided by the digital mind. The geopolitics of the coming years will also depend on these instruments. Survey starting from an essay by Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt, the manager who brought Google to the stars, led it since 2001 and remained at the top until 2017, today he is a brainiac who advises the Pentagon. Son of the economist Wilson Schmidt, he spent his childhood in Bologna at the turn of the 60s because his father taught at Johns Hopkins, he graduated in architecture and electronic engineering, but discovered the world of software at Berkeley. Even before leaving the reins of Google-Alphabet, he began collaborating with the Obama administration and then chaired the Defense Innovation Advisory Board. Two years ago, together with Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher, he wrote a book on the age of artificial intelligence (“The Age of AI: And Our Human Future”). In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs he published an essay entitled “Innovation Power” to explain how and why technology will define the future of geopolitics. Here is the incipit: “When Russian forces marched on Kyiv, few thought that Ukraine could survive. Russia had more than twice as many soldiers. Her military budget was ten times larger. The US intelligence community estimated that Kyiv would fall in a week or two at the latest.” Instead the Russian bear got bogged down. Why were the owls of the CIA also denied?