Chris Meserole is the Director of the Brookings AI & Emerging Technology Initiative and a Fellow in the Brookings Foreign Policy program.
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The United States needs to create a government-wide process to carefully weigh if and when it would ever use deepfakes.
With the 2020 presidential election about to take place, concerns about foreign interference, disinformation, mail ballot snafus, and voter suppression remain high. Already, there have been major phishing attacks against leading campaigns and Facebook has removed hundreds of thousands of fake accounts operated by foreign entities. With countries such as Russia, China, and Iran having a major stake in the outcome, what should U.S. election officials be doing to safeguard the election? Are American policymakers prepared for what likely will be the most important election in decades?
The U.S. and its allies would do well to prepare for heightened cyber activity from Iran. But they would do better to prepare for military force more.
“My problem isn’t terrorists, it’s the KKK,” a senior social media company executive told us. We’d asked him about the challenges of countering terrorist groups like the Islamic State, only to receive an education about the difficulties of countering nonviolent hate groups. He had a point.
Editor’s Note: We know artificial intelligence will change the very nature of war—but we don't know how. The United States, China, and other powers recognize this transformative potential and, even as they seek to exploit it, fear that others will gain the upper hand in an artificial intelligence arms race. My Brookings colleague Chris Meserole describes how artificial intelligence might produce a new security dilemma and proposes several ways to mitigate the risk.
Daniel Byman
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Editor’s Note: The rapid pace of technological innovation is changing the nature of warfare, and futurists are busy spinning out scenarios of a U.S.-China clash in twenty years involving nano-technology and fully autonomous weapons systems. Yet how will new technologies shape insurgency and counterinsurgency, which conjures up images of guerrillas hiding in Vietnam's jungles? My Brookings colleague Chris Meserole looks at two of the latest books on the subject and assesses how the balance between rebels and government may tilt.
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Opportunities to glimpse misinformation in action are fairly rare. But after the recent attack in Toronto, a journalist on Twitter unwittingly carried out a natural experiment that shows how quickly “fake news” can spread.