Considering the importance of autonomous weapon system design factors to future military leaders

Abstract

Despite the growing breadth of research related to the perceived risks and benefits of Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS), there remains a dearth of research into understanding how perceptions of AWS among military officers are affected by design factors. This paper demonstrates that ease of use, and user perception of the concept of using an autonomous weapon system, would be less of a barrier to trusted deployment by this emerging generation of military leaders than ensuring that autonomous systems have robust, transparent and reliable decision-making processes and that operators or supervisors are able to meaningfully monitor the systems nominally under their command. The core contribution of this paper addresses the question of how deliberate design choices could improve or diminish the capacity of junior officers to exercise meaningful human control over autonomous systems.

Autonomous weapons and ethical judgments: Experimental evidence on attitudes toward the military use of “killer robots”.

“…Most of the existing surveys on the topic are merely descriptive (Carpenter, 2013; Galliott & Wyatt, 2020; Ipsos, 2019; Moshkina & Arkin, 2008; Van der Loos & Croft, 2015). The few survey experiments examine issues such as the impact of popular culture on public perceptions (Young & Carpenter, 2018), the varying levels of public support in the context of increasing military utility, and development patterns in foreign countries (Horowitz, 2016b), the relationship between autonomy and accountability for civilian casualties (Walsh, 2015), or the acceptability of military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) among AI researchers (Zhang et al, 2021).…”