Conceptualizing the Human Role in Warfare: Beyond ‘Control’ and Towards ‘Agency’?

Topic: Conceptualising the Human Role in Warfare: Beyond ‘Control’ and Towards ‘Agency’?

When: 19 March at 12.00-13.00

Where: Online

Speaker: Anna Nadibaidze, postdoctoral researcher at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark.

Moderator: Bibi Imre-Millei, PhD student in Political Science at Lund University

Spoken language: English

Abstract

The role of the human in warfare is a key concern of academic, policy, and regulatory debates on military applications of AI technologies, including autonomous weapon systems. While ‘meaningful human control’ (MHC) is currently the most influential concept for foregrounding the importance of the human role in the use of force, it also lacks a sufficiently nuanced account of the relationship between humans and AI systems, especially the way that human-machine interactions can be co-constitutive of elements required for control, such as human agency. This talk will discuss some of the limitations of MHC in the debate on AI in the military—and beyond—as well as the importance of investigating how the exercise of human agency is affected by human-machine interactions. The talk will also introduce the main research objectives of Independent Research Fund Denmark-funded project “The Distributed Agency of Humans and Machines in Military Applications of AI” (HuMach), which considers the relationship between humans and AI technologies in the context of a complex socio-technical system resulting in distributed agency.

Speaker Bio

Dr Anna Nadibaidze is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark. In her current research with the HuMach project, she investigates the framework of Responsible AI and whether it addresses key issues in the distribution of agency and human-machine interaction in the military domain. Anna holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Southern Denmark. Her work has been published in journals such as Contemporary Security Policy, Ethics and Information Technology, and Journal of International Relations and Development.