"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." We often associate Artificial Intelligence (AI) with dystopian movie scenes, such as this one, a quote by HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science-fiction movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." The idea is that of a human-created AI system going out of control and turning against the humans in some ways. Recent discussions around OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT are reminiscent of that, asking the question: "What if?" We have seen these discussions initiated by both the public and policymakers, resulting in, among others, NIST's AI risk management framework, AI committees in government agencies, and a public dialogue on the matter.

In tune with these concerns, Reza Montasari's fall 2022 release of the Springer book "Artificial Intelligence and National Security" is a series of curated papers on various topics related to the book title. These papers are mostly focusing on the use of AI for national security and a wide range of legal, ethical, moral and privacy challenges that come with it. Some of the papers are co-authored by Montasari, some are not.

A total of eleven articles, effectively chapters, are featured in this book. The topics sometimes overlap a little, so here is an overview of these papers.

The first one, "Artificial Intelligence and the Spread of Mis- and Disinformation" talks about the post-truth era and the use of AI for nefarious information campaigns, invoking thoughts of another dystopian work, 1984. It discusses the clear difference between mis- and disinformation, and the double-edge sword of AI here: creation and mitigation are both possible for this topic, which is very timely.

The second one, "How States' Recourse to Artificial Intelligence for National Security Purposes Threatens Our Most Fundamental Rights" explores the pitfalls of the use of AI technology in the context of human rights violations or constitutional rights violations, depending on your jurisdiction. Here the reader will find discussions of the impact of surveillance technologies on both sides of the fence, whatever your fence may be.

The third one, "The Use of AI in Managing Big Data Analysis Demands: Status and Future Directions" taps in the controversies of big data analysis. Data is easy to accumulate, and the ramifications can be deep: while data can originate from one location, its origin can be varied due to the vast nature of the Internet or the presence of multinational companies across the globe.

The fourth one, "The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Content Moderation in Countering Violent Extremism on Social Media Platforms" touches upon the moderation of extreme views being proliferation in social media platforms, which isn't always successful when applied with AI techniques.

The fifth one, "A Critical Analysis into the Beneficial and Malicious Utilisations of Artificial Intelligence" performs a survey of benign and malicious uses of AI. A rather optimistic view argues that benign uses may outweigh the malicious ones.

The sixth one, "Countering Terrorism: Digital Policing of Open Source Intelligence and Social Media Using Artificial Intelligence" is similar to the fourth one, discussing moderation, analysis, and policing of social media using AI.

The seventh one, "Cyber Threat Prediction and Modelling" considers threat prediction and modelling at the business level, e.g. for C-Suite executives, for those seeking risk management appraoches using AI.

The eighth one, "A Critical Analysis of the Dark Web Challenges to Digital Policing" investigates the dark and deep web and what policies may be needed to limit illegal behavior there.

The ninth one, "Insights into the Next Generation of Policing: Understanding the Impact of Technology on the Police Force in the Digital Age" muses about the impact of AI on the police work and patrolling the digital beat.

The tenth one, "The Dark Web and Digital Policing" is similar to the eighth one, and tries to find a middle ground between enforcing laws in the dark web as well as protecting it.

The eleventh one, finally, "Pre-emptive Policing: Can Technology be the Answer to Solving London's Knife Crime Epidemic?" talks about combining various modern techniques, including AI, for combating real physical crime (rather than cybercrime) in a real city, London in this case. It's not quite a "Minority Report" theme, yet another dystopian reference by this reviewer, but many enforcement agencies already use the assistance of smart technologies for combating crime.

The book is really meant to be thought-provoking, to enable discussions to what extent of the law or with what technological capability, AI or not, this world should be moving forward. It is by no means complete, but each paper (or chapter) provides good starting points with extensive references for reading further into each domain that is brought forth in this book.

Overall this is a timely book, especially in light of the discussions about the OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT (as well as Dall-E image manipulation) and the role of AI technologies in modern society in recent weeks. I hope you will enjoy reading it.