Thinking About Foreign Policy: Finding an Appropriate Role for Artificially Intelligent Computers

The growing complexity of the foreign-policy conundrum has spawned a tremendous increase in the information available to support decisions without a commensurate increase in the ability to effectively process it. Office automation offers a means of increasing the productivity and effectiveness of human decision-makers but does not help with the analysis and interpretation of information. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been proposed for this support role, and in some cases, such systems are already appearing in the military, intelligence, and foreign-policy sectors. This report considers some of the transformations in international systems that these systems may produce. But, the report focuses on symbolic processing techniques from AI that make new categories of political phenomena amenable to formal modeling. The new modeling opportunities require rethinking some fundamental notions of political science and call for reconceptualization of societies and organizations within ...