Open seminar: Who decides? Human and machine judgement in war
Elke Schwartz and Keith Dear.
The WASP-HS Research Network on Artificial Intelligence and War (AI-WAR) opens its seminar series with a conversation between two people who have thought hardest, from opposite directions, about what happens when algorithmic systems enter the decision to use force.
Elke Schwarz (Queen Mary University of London) has spent a decade asking what military AI does to moral agency and responsibility: who, if anyone, is answerable when targeting is delegated to a machine.
Keith Dear (Cassi, King's College London) has spent the same decade inside the system, arguing that the question is not whether machines will judge but how human and machine judgement can be made to complement each other. The AI-WAR inaugural event will be an opportunity to confront these perspectives at the heart of debates over the military adoption of AI.
More about Elke Schwarz and Keith Dear
Elke Schwarz is Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University of London. Her work sits at the nexus of ethics, technology and violence, with a focus on military AI, autonomous weapons, drones and robotics, and how they reshape moral agency and responsibility in war. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (Manchester University Press, 2018), Vice-Chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and an Associate of the Imperial War Museum.
Keith Dear is founder and CEO of the AI strategy firm Cassi and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London. He was Expert Adviser to the UK Prime Minister on science, technology, space and defence modernisation, and Director of AI Innovation at Fujitsu, where he led the Centre for Cognitive Technologies. A former RAF intelligence officer with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Abkhazia and Mali, he holds a doctorate in experimental psychology from Oxford and works on strategy, forecasting and the complementarity of human and machine judgement.
Register to participate on site
Please register via the link no later than 4 October: https://survey.fhs.se/survey/3202
Live broadcast via Zoom
Follow the event online (you don't need to register for the broadcast). A link will be published here as few days ahead of the seminar.
The AI-WAR network
AI-WAR is a new research network funded by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS) programme. It is hosted at the Swedish Defence University, directed by Antoine Bousquet and Matthew Ford.
It exists to connect and strengthen Swedish research on AI, autonomous systems and war, and to link it to the Nordic and European research community.