What war elephants can teach us about the future of AI in combat
BERTOLINI LAURA
Eric Velte, Aaron Dant
June 14, 2023·5 min read
The use of artificial intelligence in combat poses a thorny ethical dilemma for Pentagon leaders. The conventional wisdom is that they must choose between two equally bad alternatives: either enforce full human supervision of the AI systems at the cost of speed and accuracy or allow AI to operate with no supervision at all.
In the first option, our military builds and deploys “human in the loop” AI systems. These systems adhere to ethical standards and the laws of war but are limited by the abilities of the human beings that supervise them. It is widely believed that such systems are doomed to be slower than any unsupervised, “unethical” systems used by our adversaries. The unethical autonomous systems appear to boast a competitive edge that, left unchallenged, has the potential to erode Western strategic advantage.
The second option is to completely sacrifice human oversight for machine speed, which could lead to unethical and undesirable behavior of AI systems on the battlefield.
Realizing that neither of these options is sufficient, we need to embrace a new approach. Much like the emergence of the cyber warrior in the realm of cybersecurity, the realm of AI requires a new role – that of the “AI operator.”
https://news.yahoo.com/war-elephants-teach-us-future-182746673.html
