CONCEPT
Dual-Use Technology
The structural property shared by every powerful general-purpose technology — including satellites, nuclear physics, GPS, and modern AI — that the same capability serves civilian and military ends, and the two uses cannot be separated by the technology itself.
Dual-use denotes technologies whose design does not pick out a civilian or a military application; the same artifact, trained in the same way, serves either. The classic cases are atomic energy (reactors and weapons), satellite reconnaissance (weather and surveillance), and GPS (navigation and munitions guidance). AI is the dual-use technology of the present moment. The same language-model capability that summarizes legal filings generates phishing emails; the same image-generation capability that makes marketing assets makes non-consensual deepfakes; the same autonomous-planning capability that runs a logistics pipeline runs a reconnaissance mission. Dual-use is not a property to be eliminated; it is a property to be governed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Clarke's satellite papers are the cleanest illustration of what dual-use does to forecasting. The 1945 Extra-Terrestrial Relays paper proposed geostationary relays for civilian communications. Within twenty years the Clarke orbit was host to military early-warning systems (the DSP constellation), signals-intelligence platforms, and navigation constellations