Autonomous Military Systems: collective responsibility and distributed burdens

Abstract

The introduction of Autonomous Military Systems (AMS) onto contemporary battlefields raises concerns that they will bring with them the possibility of a techno-responsibility gap, leaving insecurity about how to attribute responsibility in scenarios involving these systems. In this work I approach this problem in the domain of applied ethics with foundational conceptual work on autonomy and responsibility. I argue that concerns over the use of AMS can be assuaged by recognising the richly interrelated context in which these systems will most likely be deployed. This will allow us to move beyond the solely individualist understandings of responsibility at work in most treatments of these cases, toward one that includes collective responsibility. This allows us to attribute collective responsibility to the collectives of which the AMS form a part, and to account for the distribution of burdens that follows from this attribution. I argue that this expansion of our responsibility practices will close at least some otherwise intractable techno-responsibility gaps.

Collective Responsibility and Artificial Intelligence

“…The idea here is rather that responsibility belongs to individual human beings, but is somehow shared among them. The proposal of closing the responsibility gap by assigning responsibility to group agents has begun to be discussed in the literature on AWS (Conradie, 2023), but problems with this strategy have been noted (Taddeo & Blanchard, 2022: 10-12;Taylor, 2021: 328-331). This paper, therefore, looks at the question of whether focusing on collective responsibility in the strict sense is a more promising way in which responsibility for AI systems can be assigned.…”