ETHICAL CHALLENGES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENGE APPLIED TO DEFENSE SYSTEMS

Artificial Intelligence is currently foreseen as the most disruptive technological advance of the ongoing Digital Revolution. There is a strong competition for gaining supremacy in the international geostrategic landscape and, among many other elements, ethical considerations are starting to strongly show up.

In the Defense field, the pattern is and has always been to incorporate new tecnological and scientific developments to military capabilities, aiming to gain an advantage over rivals and competitors. Some of these breakthroughts, such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems and other military capabilities using Artificial Intelligence as their central driver, present ethical concerns which must be considered not only by States and their Armed Forces, but also by those involved in their development like engineers and manufacturers.

Among these concerns the one considered most relevant in this work is the «meaningful human control», demanded to prevent warfare from abandoning its nature of human and social phenomenon under human control and becoming a machine and artificial intelligence driven game.