War machines:
Can AI for war be ethical?
Source: The Cove, Australian Army’s professional military education
In an article for The Cove, Aaron Wright explores whether AI for war can by definition be ethical. Modern day battlefields are becoming increasingly proliferated with artificial combatants, the US Department of Defense (DoD) on 24 Feb 20 announced a number of ethical guidelines (US Dept of Defense, 2020) to help assure the public that as they continue to develop AI for battlefield use, it would be designed and deployed in an ethical manner.
Deontology and its followers are mostly concerned about following the ‘moral law’. Most widely recognised in the form developed by Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century (Burton et al., 2017).
Utilitarianists are the opposite side of the coin to Deontologists, ultimately considering the consequences of actions, more than the ethics of the action itself. They are concerned with creating the greatest balance of good over evil (Frankena, 1963).
Virtue as a framework for ethics differs from considerations of ‘duty’ or calculations of consequence by its focus on good character (Neubert & Montanez, 2020). Where Utilitarianists will define virtue as an action that yields good consequences and deontologists as the fulfilment of duty or a moral code, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept, rather asserting that virtuous behaviour stems from undefinable, innate characteristics of human consciousness (Stanford University of Philosophy, 2016).
Contract theory, popularized by Thomas Hobbes postulates that no person is naturally so strong they could be free from fear of another person, and no one so weak they could not present a threat. Thus, it is logical to form networks of mutual obligations for ongoing survival.
An example being how we surrender some freedoms to the ‘state’, which enforces rules to guarantee and protect every person’s rights in return (Ethics Centre, 2016).
These mutual agreements between individuals and collectives as to what is proper is known as the social contract.