The Future of War: Drone Surveillance, Killer Robots & Lethal AI Weapons · #DNL26 #TheKillCloud

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Laura Nolan (Member, ICRAC - International Committee for Robot Arms Control, IE), Jack Poulson (Executive Director, Tech Inquiry, US), Taniel Yusef (Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, UK). Moderated by Theresa Züger (Research Group Lead: Public Interest AI, AI & Society Lab, DE).

This panel focuses on the current military artificial intelligence arms race and the implications of private companies in deploying AI, big data, and deep learning to war zones. In 2017 the U.S. Department of Defense launched Project Maven, to explore the potential of establishing an Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, overseen by the undersecretary of defense for. Private companies like Google got involved in the project, asking engineers and tech workers to contribute to the development of military autonomous weapons systems, causing deep concerns, which were expressed by Google employees on an open letter to withdraw from Project Maven and to commit to not weaponizing its technology. Among the former Google employees that pointed out the dangers around Project Maven, were Jack Poulson and Laura Nolan, today respectively Executive Director and Treasurer of Board of Tech Inquiry. Google employees exposed the risks to use artificial intelligence technology to analyse drone surveillance footage and refused to implicate their work in the practice of targeted killings and the so-called signature strikes and pattern-of-life strikes – which raised significant questions of racial and gender bias, as well as frequent human mistakes in target identification and strike analysis. Today the deployment of AI for war conflicts reached an even more pervasive level: Russia, China, United States, United Kingdom, Israel, South Korea, France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, to name a few, are developing lethal autonomous weapons. The Stop Killer Robots Campaign, presented by Taniel Yusef during UN talks in Geneva in August 2021, has called for all AI killing machines not operated by humans to be banned.The campaign emphasises the need for a clear legally binding prohibition on autonomous weapons that target humans. As pointed out by Laura Nolan, killer robots have the potential to do “calamitous things that they were not originally programmed for”. This panel will give a history of the companies involved in common operating picture production, addressing how this ties into the data fusion side of Project Maven, and will discuss the present and future threads posed by the use of AI in Algorithmic Warfare and automated weapons systems.

More: https://www.disruptionlab.org/the-kill-cloud