Is Ethical AI a possibility in the Future of War?
Anonymous | October 8, 2022
War in and of itself is already a gray area when it comes to ethics and morality. Bring on machinery with autonomous decision making and it’s enough to bring eery chills reminiscent of a scary movie. One of the things that has made the headlines in recent warfare in Ukraine is the use of drones at a higher rate than has been used in modern conventional warfare. Ukraine and Russia are both engaged in drone warfare and using drones for strategic strikes.
Drones are part human controlled and essentially part robot and have AI baked in. What will the future look like though? Robots making their own decisions to strike? Completely autonomous flying drones and subs? There are various technologies being worked on as we speak to do exactly these things. Algorithmic bias becomes a much more cautionary tale when life and death decisions are made autonomously by machines.
Just this month Palantir was allocated a $229 million contract to assess the state of AI for the US Army Research Laboratory. That is just one branch of the military and one contract. The military as a whole is making huge investments in this area. In a Government Accountability Office report to Congressional Committees, it stated that “Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s budget increased from $89 million in fiscal year 2019 to $242.5 million in fiscal year 2020, to $278.2 million for fiscal year 2021.” That is a 300% increase from 2019.
So, how can AI in warfare exist ethically? Most of the suggestions I see suggest never removing a human from the loop in some form or fashion. Drones have the ability these days to operate nearly autonomously. U.S. Naval Institute mentions being very intentional about not removing a human from the loop because AI could still lack the intuition in nuanced scenarios that can escalate conflict past what is necessary. Even in the above infographic it clearly emphasizes the expert knowledge, which is the human element. Another important suggestion for ethical AI is not so different from when you train non-military models and that is to ensure equitable outcomes and reduce bias. With military technology, you want to be able to identify a target, but how you do that should not be inclusive of racial bias. Traceability and reliability were also mentioned as ways to employ AI more ethically according to a National Defense Magazine article. This makes sense that soldiers responsible should have the right education and training and that sufficient testing should be undertaken before use in conflict.
The converse argument here is, if we are ‘ethical’ in warfare, does that mean our adversaries will play by those same rules? If a human in the loop causes hesitation or pause that machinery operating autonomously on AI didn’t have, could that be catastrophic in wartime? Capabilities of our adversaries tend to dictate the needs of our military technologies being developed in Research and Development, embedded within the very contract requirements.
Let’s hope we will all get to remain military ethicists, keeping a human in the loop helps to protect against known deficiencies and biases inherent in AI. Data science models are built with uncertainty but when it comes to human life, special care must be taken. I’m glad to see Congressional Briefings that at least indicate we are thinking about this type of care and not ignoring the potential harms. I think it’s very possible that even though war is messy and murky with ethics, to be intentional on ethical choices with AI while still protecting and defending our interests as a nation…but I’m also not sure we want to be the last to create autonomous robot weapons, just in case. So, exploring technology and deploying thoughtfully appears to be the right balance.
Citations:
– https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2016/december/ai-goes-war
– https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/10/03/us-dod-ai-machine-learning/
– https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105834.pdf
– https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/11/10/pentagon-grappling-with-ais-ethical-challenges