A Practicable Operationalisation of Meaningful Human Control

Abstract

Meaningful Human Control (MHC) has been a consistent key term in legal debates concerning autonomous weapon systems (AWS), but its usefulness as a policy or lawmaking tool is limited due to a lack of clarity on what the concept encompasses. This study engaged in a thorough literature study of official statements, policy papers and academic papers published between 2013–2021 to determine features common to these proposals and synthesise a workable framework of MHC. The framework identifies five core elements—awareness, weaponeering, context control, prediction and accountability—and many interlocking mechanisms which link these elements together in a causal and chronological manner corresponding to the military targeting process. Subsequently, a detailed commentary and discussion is provided on the individual differences between sources, how specific elements can be implemented in practice by military commanders, and particularly controversial points are highlighted which require specific consideration by commentators and policymakers. The framework identifies concrete and practicable ways commanders can exercise control over AWS and serves as a solid foundation for further legal analysis of commanders’ duties when employing AWS, for future policy discussions, and as a problem-solving tool to resolve important legal questions such as the ubiquitous ‘accountability gap’ conundrum.

A guerra aérea autónoma e a transformação do poder aéreo

“…Existem diferentes perspetivas sobre os mecanismos para operacionalizar um princípio de controlo humano significativo (Ekelhof, 2019;Eklund, 2020;Kwik, 2022), onde se destacam os parâmetros (Boulanin, Davison, Goussac, & Carlsson, 2020: 36-37): de uso do sistema de armas (medidas de restrição de ataque); o ambiente onde é empregue (limitando a áreas onde não estejam civis presentes); e a interação Homem-Máquina (permitindo ao homem a intervenção direta na ação do sistema).…”

Model of a military autonomous device following International Humanitarian Law

“…While such developments are welcomed by some, others resist the idea of delegating use of force decisions to AI for a variety of reasons, such as difficulties in assigning responsibility (Chengeta, 2016;Bo, 2021), fears that it might reduce the threshold for conflict (Hitoshi & McLaughlin, 2014;Crootof, 2015), and ethical concerns such as dehumanisation (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2018; Sartor & Omicini, 2016) (for summaries of the overall debate and points of contention, see (Lewis, 2015;Cummings, 2018;Santoni de Sio & van den Hoven, 2018;Eklund, 2020)). While the concept of meaningful human control has been interpreted by some to require a human in the loop at all times, others have interpreted the requirement more loosely as also being attainable through meaningful human involvement in the decisionmaking process leading up to the point of activation (Kwik, 2022). Assuming no consensus can be reached on this matter, it is not precluded that, at least by adherents of the latter school, certain decisions will indeed be delegated to AI in the future.…”

“…In case where a task is indeed delegated, a common conceptualisation is that the human decision-making process is not eliminated but instead moved 'forward' (Ekelhof, 2016;Adviesraad Internationale Vraagstukken, 2015). As mentioned above, the popular concept of meaningful human control as summarised by Eklund (2020); Kwik (2022) is in this regard helpful: even if commanders delegate a task(s) to a device, they remain responsible for ensuring sufficient knowledge of the system's reliability, predicting its approximate behaviour in the field, its robustness against likely enemy countermeasures (International Committee of the Red Cross, 2016), and implementing sufficient contextual controls to ensure performance and controllability is maintained. The main contribution of this work, then, is to provide a general framework of how an autonomous device can perform each of these functions.…”