Editor’s Note: This is the first entry in a weekly series of posts that I am writing for the Future of Life Institute regarding the legal vacuum surrounding autonomous weapons. This entry is cross-posted on FLI’s website. Subsequent posts in this series cover the definition of “autonomous” in the context of weapons, the reasons why the deployment of AWSs could lead to violations of the laws of armed conflict, the accountability problem that autonomous weapons would present (including a deeper look at the problem of foreseeing what an AWS will do), and potential legal approaches to autonomous weapons.
The year is 2020 and intense fighting has once again broken out between Israel and Hamas militants based in Gaza. In response to a series of rocket attacks, Israel rolls out a new version of its Iron Dome air defense system. Designed in a huge collaboration involving defense companies headquartered in the United States, Israel, and India, this third generation of the Iron Dome has the capability to act with unprecedented autonomy and has cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology that allows it to analyze a tactical situation by drawing from information gathered by an array of onboard sensors and a variety of external data sources. Unlike prior generations of the system, the Iron Dome 3.0 is designed not only to intercept and destroy incoming missiles, but also to identify and automatically launch a precise, guided-missile counterattack against the site from where the incoming missile was launched. The day after the new system is deployed, a missile launched by the system strikes a Gaza hospital far removed from any militant activity, killing scores of Palestinian civilians. Outrage swells within the international community, which demands that whoever is responsible for the atrocity be held accountable. Unfortunately, no one can agree on who that is…
Much has been made in recent months and years about the risks associated with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and, with it, the automation of tasks that once were the exclusive province of humans. But legal systems have not yet developed regulations governing the safe development and deployment of AI systems or clear rules governing the assignment of legal responsibility when autonomous AI systems cause harm. Consequently, it is quite possible that many harms caused by autonomous machines will fall into a legal and regulatory vacuum. The prospect of autonomous weapons systems (AWSs) throws these issues into especially sharp relief. AWSs, like all military weapons, are specifically designed to cause harm to human beings—and lethal harm, at that. But applying the laws of armed conflict to attacks initiated by machines is no simple matter.
The core principles of the laws of armed conflict are straightforward enough. Most important to the AWS debate, attackers must distinguish between civilians and combatants, strike only when it is actually necessary to a legitimate military purpose, and refrain from an attack if the likely harm to civilians outweighs the military advantage that would be gained. But what if the attacker is a machine? How can a machine make the seemingly subjective determination regarding whether an attack is militarily necessary? Can an AWS be programmed to quantify whether the anticipated harm to civilians would be “proportionate?” Does the law permit anyone other than a human being to make that kind of determination? Should it?
But the issue goes even deeper than simply determining whether the laws of war can be encoded into the AI components of an AWS. Even if everyone agreed that a particular AWS attack constituted a war crime, would our sense of justice be satisfied by “punishing” that machine? I suspect that most people would answer that question with a resounding “no.” Human laws demand human accountability. Unfortunately, as of right now, there are no laws at the national or international level that specifically address whether, when, or how AWSs can be deployed, much less who (if anyone) can be held legally responsible if an AWS commits an act that violates the laws of armed conflict. This makes it difficult for those laws to have the deterrent effect that they are designed to have; if no one will be held accountable for violating the law, then no one will feel any particular need to ensure compliance with the law. On the other hand, if there are human(s) with a clear legal responsibility to ensure that an AWS’s operations comply with the laws of war, then horrors such as the hospital bombing described in the intro this essay would be much less likely to come to fruition.
So how should the legal voids surrounding autonomous weapons–and for that matter, AI in general–be filled? Over the coming weeks and months, that question–along with the other questions raised in this essay–will be examined in greater detail on the website of the Future of Life Institute and on the Law and AI blog. Stay tuned.