Ethics and Beyond: Challenges and Opportunities for Military AI

Overall Relevance to the Conference Theme and Goals: Diverse methodologies are employed for ethical analysis: Kantian deontology optimizes fidelity to moral axioms; pragmatic realism optimally achieves righteous goals (usually national interests); consequentialism optimally balances moral good and bad. The context of an ethical analysis influences the analysis by shifting the axioms, goals, and moral balance. Beyond that, uncertainty pervades ethical analysis in the real world. In particular, military affairs are often surrounded by the fog of war. This session highlights the diversity of ethical foci and analytical tools, and the challenge of applying those tools when facing deep uncertainty. This session is particularly relevant to the conference theme “Responsible deployment and use of AI”.

Concreteness: This panel contains specialists with a broad range of experience. Our speakers include academic professors from both quantitative and qualitative fields, leaders of policy think tanks focused on ethics, AI and defense, and officers from the militaries of two different countries. This provides concrete focus on real-world challenges and on practical attempts to meet these challenges.