MAGIC BULLETS: THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN WEAPON SYSTEMS
LOOPED IN
The author notes that the desire to keep humans in control combined with the current distrust in autonomous systems means that systems rolled out over the next 30 to 50 years will most likely continue to keep humans involved in operating them to some degree, similar to these semi-autono- mous vehicles at Fort Bliss, Texas. (U.S. Army photo by Jerome Aliotta, CCDC Ground Vehicle Systems Center)
of interesting questions: Is it ethical to keep a human in the loop for weapon systems when a machine is less error-prone? Does the idea that only humans should be allowed to kill humans trump the desire to minimize civilian deaths? Are we willing to accept additional, avoidable deaths in order to keep humans in absolute control of lethal decisions? Is our human need to have someone to blame, someone to “hold accountable” and exact retribution from, more important than rational interest balancing that mini- mizes suffering?
Tis desire to keep humans in control and the current distrust in autonomous systems mean that the next systems to come in the mid-term, perhaps the next 30 to 50 years, will most likely continue to be semi-autonomous. Te underlying technology will continue to improve, allowing human operators to place more and more trust in these systems.
Over time, we should expect the automated portions to become more capable and the human-machine interfaces to improve. Tis will enable human operators to increase their control over multi- ple systems while decreasing the level of detail the human has to control directly.
CONTROLLING LETHALITY Future semi-automated systems will evolve through three levels of human control over lethality. We currently operate at the first level, where every individual trigger pull to deploy a lethal weapon requires human approval.
120 Army AL&T Magazine Summer 2019
At the second level, the person operating the weapon becomes more like a small-unit leader; the human decides when and where to open fire and the weapon then picks out individual targets and engages them. Te human retains the ability to order a cease-fire.
Te third and most abstract level is like a battalion-or-above commander exercising command and control. Here, the human decides on the mission parameters (such as left and right bound- aries, movement corridors, desired outcomes, sequence of events or constraints), selects the engagement area, and designates weapon-control measures throughout the mission (e.g., firing only at identified enemies who have fired first while moving to the target area, firing at all targets not identified as friendly inside the engagement area boundaries, or not firing within 10 meters of friendly locations). Te weapon system then executes the mission orders, finds and selects targets, and reacts within its parameters without further guidance as events unfold.
All three levels of control retain a human in the loop and allow humans to decide and define what a valid target is. Whether each level is deemed acceptable depends on how broadly we inter- pret the requirement to have a person selecting “specified target groups,” which is the language about semi-autonomous weapons used in current DOD policy.
Is it adequate to say that all persons in a designated geographic area are part of the specified target group? Does it matter that the human has direct observation of the targeted area to see and
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