On the Threshold of a Dream

A recent editorial of mine carried the title of the Bob Dylan album Time Out of Mind, with reference back to the immortal Shakespearian phrase “time out of joint.” It was a reflection focusing on the challenges and tragedies of a drawn-out, seemingly never-ending pandemic. The reference this time around is probably more obscure to most readers, but just as evocative of our strange times: On the Threshold of a Dream, an adventurous 1969 album by the British band The Moody Blues. The threshold at that time was, most especially, the space age. In our context of the early 2020s, the title evokes the steps we are taking into an ever more thoroughly digitalized world. Artificial intelligence, in the form of increasingly self-learning machines with underlying complex algorithms, is already part of our world. However, most specialists in the field insist that we find ourselves only at the very beginning of what can reasonably be called a dream. Whether it is a sweet and hopeful dream or a downright nightmare is one of the defining questions of our time. During the next decades, the nature of warfare and military defense will be increasingly digital, with conflicts – both in training and in real life – taking place in cyber space just as much as on the kinetic battlefield. More than that, we are facing a world where human soldiers will cooperate ever more closely with, and entrust their lives and missions to, machine agents. The speed and computational power of these machines, alongside their possibility of going well beyond their initial programming, means that even the most fateful of life-anddeath decisions could, for all practical purposes, be made by machines. This may help ensure that law and ethics prevail over irrationality, human failure, and destructive emotions, such as hatred and revenge. But it could equally well lead us to a battlefield where humans have little control over the most dramatic of decisions, and where we end up deferring to authorities that have no human superiors. We are indeed on the threshold, if not of a dream, then at least of a new era, one that will possibly be more different from previous eras than we can currently imagine. As co-editor of this journal, I have no doubt that it is ethics, just as much as – or more than – the technology itself, that will decide whether we are facing nightmarish scenarios or a more hopeful future.