Description
Abstract: Decision-making is a foundational aspect of any organisation, including its governance. In the face of an environment with increasing complexity and uncertainty encompassing actors, threats, and challenges, several mechanisms have been implemented in order to improve decision-making processes and enhance the capability of responding to a diverse range of scenarios. In that sense, it is possible to infer that anticipatory governance emerged as a conceptual and applied innovation, which has been applied to several domains from 2012 onwards. However, in addition to this conceptual mechanism, there are ongoing efforts to transform the decision-making process in defence settings based on the ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
That’s in precisely the context of DARPA’s “In the Moment” programme, released in March 2022, and the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding between the European Commission and the stakeholder associations. Such associations, representing AI, data, and robotics, manifest state-level institutions' intentions to bring together trusted human and AI decision-makers to align decisions and generate problem-solving tools in a crisis scenario.
Beyond the challenges posed by such innovative conceptual and technological efforts, some questions emerge: a) To what extent could AI be used to supplement human intelligence in decision-making? b) How effective is the alignment of artificial intelligence and human intelligence in decision-making? c) What is the role of AI both ex ante (as an advisor) and ex post (as a decision-maker) in relation to the human decision-maker? d) To what extent does the alignment of AI and human intelligence affect the implementation of anticipatory governance?
In order to respond to these questions, this paper aims to present the context in which AI and PPPs started to abridge the decision-making processes, as well as how the concept of anticipatory governance unfolded in defence contexts. We aim to discuss qualitatively the effectiveness of AI in decision-making, focusing on neuroscience metaphors as our underpinning approach to depict this interaction during critical junctures, which are particularly common in times of crisis. This combination enables us to investigate the possibilities and limitations of using AI in decision-making, as well as how they would affect anticipatory governance, contributing to the debate about this future-ubiquitous reality in defence policy and the multiple stakeholders posed by PPPs.
