China’s Liaoning Carrier Battle Group in West Pacific waters (Source: Twitter)

China, U.S. Navies in Race Using AI to Produce Cutting-Edge War Ships

After the major uproar over the release of ChatGPT and Bing AI has turned the tech world on its head a little bit. Now comes news from eurasiantimes.com that China has a super AI designing warships in a matter of 24 hours.

A team of researchers from the China Ship Design and Research Center, headed by Luo Wei, a senior engineer with the ship design center, published a paper in the Chinese-language journal Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems on February 27.

The researchers claimed in the paper that their AI designer took only a day to complete work that humans would need nearly a year to achieve with the most advanced computer tools.

Considering the scale and complexity of modern warships, mistakes are sure to happen during the design process, and it can take several hours to discover and rectify them. However, when the researchers put the AI designer to the test, with more than 400 challenging tasks, they found that the AI could accomplish 100 percent accuracy.

Pretty scary stuff if you work at the Pentagon.

China Could Surpass U.S.

China already boasts the world’s largest navy numerically after overtaking the US Navy between 2015 and 2020. If the recent claims by Luo’s team are anything to go by, the US military planners have much to fear.

The U.S. Navy is already concerned about China’s expanding naval fleet and its capacity to produce warships at a very high pace. U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told reporters in Washington last month that U.S. naval shipyards cannot match the output of Chinese ones.

“They have 13 shipyards. In some cases, their shipyard has more capacity – one shipyard has more capacity than all of our shipyards combined. That presents a real threat,” Del Toro said.

The United States considers itself the technology leader in the world, especially when it comes to high-tech weapons of war, but our biggest problem with China appears to be the size of its manufacturing. They have 400 ships currently while the U.S. has only 300. All these ship numbers are expected to go up but China’s will rise faster.

According to researchers looking back at wars between sides with numbers and the sides with better technology, the sides with the number won far more often.

In a January issue of the US Naval Institute’s (USNI’s) Proceedings magazine, Tangredi looked at 28 naval wars in history, going back to the Greco-Persian Wars of 500 BC, and found that superior technology defeated more significant numbers in only three instances.

On the issue of a potential future conflict with China, Tangredi says that a naval war against China in the western Pacific in this decade would see a smaller U.S. Naval force against a gigantic PLA Navy in waters near China, inside the range of PLA’s air and rocket forces.

“U.S. leaders must ask themselves to what extent they are willing to bet on technological—without numerical—superiority in that fight,” wrote Tangredi.

read more at eurasiantimes.com