Engines of power: Electricity, AI, and general-purpose, military transformations

Ding, Jeffrey; Dafoe, Allan

doi:10.1017/eis.2023.1

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…Lipsey, Carlaw, and Bekar 2005. See also Ding and Dafoe 2023. contrast, niche technologies execute a narrow range of missions. For example, until the mid-nineteenth century rifles were isolated to special military operations where range and accuracy were paramount.…”

Section: Integration and The Disclosure Constraintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dual Use Deception: How Technology Shapes Cooperation in International Relations

Vaynman,

Volpe

2023

Int Org

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Almost all technology is dual use to some degree: it has both civilian and military applications. This feature creates a dilemma for cooperation. States can design arms control institutions to curtail costly competition over some military technology. But they also do not want to limit valuable civilian uses. How does the dual use nature of technology shape the prospects for cooperation? We argue that the duality of technology presents a challenge not by its very existence but rather through the ways it alters information constraints on the design of arms control institutions. We characterize variation in technology along two dual use dimensions: (1) the ease of distinguishing military from civilian uses; and (2) the degree of integration within military enterprises and the civilian economy. Distinguishability drives the level of monitoring needed to detect violations. When a weapon is indistinguishable from its civilian counterpart, states must improve detection though intelligence collection or intrusive inspections. Integration sharpens the costs of disclosing information to another state. For highly integrated technology, demonstrating compliance could expose information about other capabilities, increasing the security risks from espionage. Together, these dimensions generate expectations about the specific information problems states face as they try to devise agreements over various technologies. We introduce a new qualitative data set to assess both variables and their impact on cooperation across all modern armament technologies. The findings lend strong support for the theory. Efforts to control emerging technologies should consider how variation in the dual use attributes shapes this tension between detection and disclosure.

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Section: Integration and The Disclosure Constraintmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dual Use Deception: How Technology Shapes Cooperation in International Relations

Vaynman,

Volpe

2023

Int Org

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Explainable AI in the military domain

Wood

2024

Ethics Inf Technol

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has become nearly ubiquitous in modern society, from components of mobile applications to medical support systems, and everything in between. In societally impactful systems imbued with AI, there has been increasing concern related to opaque AI, that is, artificial intelligence where it is unclear how or why certain decisions are reached. This has led to a recent boom in research on “explainable AI” (XAI), or approaches to making AI more explainable and understandable to human users. In the military domain, numerous bodies have argued that autonomous and AI-enabled weapon systems ought not incorporate unexplainable AI, with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United States Department of Defense both explicitly including explainability as a relevant factor in the development and use of such systems. In this article, I present a cautiously critical assessment of this view, arguing that explainability will be irrelevant for many current and near-future autonomous systems in the military (which do not incorporate any AI), that it will be trivially incorporated into most military systems which do possess AI (as these generally possess simpler AI systems), and that for those systems with genuinely opaque AI, explainability will prove to be of more limited value than one might imagine. In particular, I argue that explainability, while indeed a virtue in design, is a virtue aimed primarily at designers and troubleshooters of AI-enabled systems, but is far less relevant for users and handlers actually deploying these systems. I further argue that human–machine teaming is a far more important element of responsibly using AI for military purposes, adding that explainability may undermine efforts to improve human–machine teamings by creating a prima facie sense that the AI, due to its explainability, may be utilized with little (or less) potential for mistakes. I conclude by clarifying that the arguments are not against XAI in the military, but are instead intended as a caution against over-inflating the value of XAI in this domain, or ignoring the limitations and potential pitfalls of this approach.

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Horses, nails, and messages: Three defense industries of the Ukraine war

Caverley

2023

Contemporary Security Policy

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Engines of power: Electricity, AI, and general-purpose, military transformations

Cited by 8 publications

References 30 publications

Dual Use Deception: How Technology Shapes Cooperation in International Relations

Dual Use Deception: How Technology Shapes Cooperation in International Relations

Explainable AI in the military domain

Horses, nails, and messages: Three defense industries of the Ukraine war

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