Description
Algorithms that rely on big data analytics and machine learning to make predictions and recommend possible courses of action will increasingly infiltrate state-level decision making on whether to wage war. The spectre of future iterations of these intelligent machines surpassing human capacities, and escaping human control, has recently received a surge in attention as an approaching existential threat. Yet, this future-focused fear obscures a grave and insidious challenge that is already here. A neglected danger that already-existing AI-enabled decision-support systems pose is that they change how we (as citizens, soldiers, and states) deliberate, how we act, and how we view ourselves as responsible agents. This has potentially profound ethical, political, and even geo-political implications – well before AI evolves to a point where some fear that it could initiate algorithmic Armageddon. I will argue that our reliance on AI-enabled and automated systems to make decisions on the resort to force threatens to create the perception that we have been displaced as the relevant decision makers and may therefore abdicate our responsibilities to intelligent machines. I will conclude by asking how these risks might, in turn, affect hard-won international norms of restraint – and how they can be mitigated.
