Drones will soon decide who to kill – Who will be responsible for the actions of autonomous drones?

Drones will soon decide who to kill – Will AI researchers or practitioners become responsible for the actions of autonomous drones?

Trigger Warnings: War, Military, Autonomous machines, Artificial Intelligence and human expiration.

A key quote from Peter Lee‘s 2018 article that kicked my cognition gears into action, was “Take out the human and you also take out the humanity of the decision to kill.”, which was earlier backdropped by the even more jarring quote, “There is a chance that warfare will move from fighting to extermination, losing any semblance of humanity in the process.” [1]. Whilst these quotes focus on the removal of human ethics and morals from the killing decision-making process, they also imply dangerous omens over the reduced human responsibility of using automated machines for purposes of war.

AI researchers involved in the development of the weapons can certainly still be held responsible for programmatic errors and bias in the design of the weapons that result in war crimes – such as the killing of civillians; whilst practitioners with final decision making power can also be liable, especially when weapons can contain “dual-use” code that can harm both civilians and targets; which is prohibited in international humanitarian law. Machines built using self-learning algorithms can be particularly dangerous as they risk inconsistencies, can be prone to developing bias, and are more unpredictable than machines based on other models.

Even those who did not design products for military purposes can also be held liable if their work is used in malicious designs, according to the “dual-use” clause. An example of this would be if a military design used Google’s Project Maven image recognition aI software as a part of a weapon’s programming. Civilian contributors as well as organisations, researchers and practitioners, can all be held liable for the actions of autonomous drones if they are handle inefficably.

Sources:

[1] – https://theconversation.com/drones-will-soon-decide-who-to-kill-94548Links to an external site.