David Whetham, Kennneth Payne While much public discussion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is focused on Terminator-like killing machines, the official UK position is that there will always be a person in (or at least on – monitoring and able to intervene) the loop making any life-or-death decisions. Unfortunately, this rather ignores defensive uses of AI… Read More AI: In Defence of Uncertainty
David Whetham Some people argue that war is such a terrible thing, atrocities and war crimes are simply an inevitable consequence. While those people might be right on the tragedy that is war, thankfully, the assumption that atrocities committed by our own forces simply have to be accepted is not shared by either Western society… Read More Dark Traits and Military Ethics
ROD THORNTON Rod Thornton is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Defence Education Research and Analysis, UK Defence Academy/Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. I recently attended a UK-government sponsored workshop on Artificial Intelligence (AI). At the start, the convenors asked the participants – from the commercial world, the Third Sector, academia and government agencies… Read More One to ponder: the UK’s ethical stance on the use of Artificial Intelligence in weapons systems
DR DEANE-PETER BAKER Deane Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Military Ethics at Kings College London. He is a panelist on the International Panel on the Regulation of Autonomous Weapons (IPRAW), however his comments here… Read More Autonomous Weapons and the Epistemology of Targeting
DR DAVID WHETHAM The military profession, as with all professions, is defined and governed in large part by its ethic; the rules and behaviours by which its members conduct themselves. Any professional military force, anywhere in the world, sees itself as distinct from a ‘mere’ group of mercenaries or long-term contractors, and that self-identity is… Read More Why Does Ethics Matter for the Military?
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