AI ON THE BATTLEFIELD
Yet the notion that ethical principles must also “evolve” with the market is wrong. Yes, we’re living in an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape, as Hassabis describes it, but abandoning a code of ethics for war could yield consequences that spin out of control.
Bring AI to the battlefield and you could get automated systems responding to one another at machine speed, with no time for diplomacy. Warfare could become more lethal, as conflicts escalate before humans have time to intervene. And the idea of “clean” automated combat could compel more military leaders toward action, even though AI systems make plenty of mistakes and could create civilian casualties too.
Automated decision making is the real problem here. Unlike previous technology that made militaries more efficient or powerful, AI systems can fundamentally change who (or what) makes the decision to take human life.
It’s also troubling that Hassabis, of all people, has his name on Google’s carefully worded justification. He sang a vastly different tune back in 2018, when the company established its AI principles, and joined more than 2,400 people in AI to put their names on a pledge not to work on autonomous weapons.
Less than a decade later, that promise hasn’t counted for much. William Fitzgerald, a former member of Google’s policy team and co-founder of the Worker Agency, a policy and communications firm, says that Google had been under intense pressure for years to pick up military contracts.
He recalled former US Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan visiting the Sunnyvale, California, headquarters of Google’s cloud business in 2017, while staff at the unit were building out the infrastructure necessary to work on top-secret military projects with the Pentagon. The hope for contracts was strong.
Fitzgerald helped halt that. He co-organised company protests over Project Maven, a deal Google did with the Department of Defense to develop AI for analysing drone footage, which Googlers feared could lead to automated targeting. Some 4,000 employees signed a petition that stated, “Google should not be in the business of war,” and about a dozen resigned in protest. Google eventually relented and didn’t renew the contract.
Looking back, Fitzgerald sees that as a blip. “It was an anomaly in Silicon Valley’s trajectory,” he said.
