Today's Edition
KHALED AL KHAWALDEH (ABU DHABI)
A sold-out crowd packed into the Hub71 workspace in Abu Dhabi on Monday to tune into a fireside chat on the ethical dilemmas associated with AI's growing number of military applications.
Faisal Al Bannai, Chairman of the Board of Directors of EDGE and Advisor to the UAE President for Strategic Research and Advanced Technology Affairs, believes that it is only natural for a country to want to defend its people with the best technology at its disposal, but believed that the technology was often used for the wrong purposes.
Al Bannai said that whilst EDGE is technically a defence company, he believes the applications that he is developing has many uses and that ultimately it was our choice how we used them.
"We really see ourselves as an advanced tech company that happens to be in the defence sector," Al Bannai told the crowd on Monday.
"I think what the UAE leadership is saying is, yes, we're building defence tech, but we're really building advanced tech capabilities that has effects on defence.
"A lot of our autonomous work capabilities on defence translate to other uses. That same autonomous technology, we converted it and we launched a company that plants date palms."
For Al Bannai, the UAE's strong leadership, infrastructure and a lack of legacy policy meant the country was able to rapidly ascend the global hierarchy for emerging technology.
This sentiment was shared by Trae Stephens, General Partner at Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril Industries, a major US weapons developer who joined Al Bannai on stage on Monday.
"I always find it amazing every time I come here how the entire country functions like VC (venture capital)… where policy is directly formed to lead towards a vision of a better future," he said.
Trae made an argument for the use of AI in war zones, believing the technologies' ability to increase accuracy, would in fact reduce conflict casualties.
"If we had perfect information, and we had perfect information that led us to go to our allies and partners and say, we know exactly what's happening, there's no confusion. We could prevent war, because then an entire alliance of countries could say this is intolerable," he said.
