ABSTRACT
To protect their common heritage of culture, personal freedom, and the rule of law in an increasingly fragile world, democracies must be able to defend themselves “at machine speed” if necessary. The use of AI in defense therefore comprises responsible weapons engagement as well as military use cases such as logistics, predictive maintenance, intelligence, surveillan ce, or reconnaissance. Responsibility as a notion poses a timeless question: How to decide “well” according to what is recognized as “true”? To arrive at an answer, responsible controllability needs to be turned into three tasks of systems engineering: (i) Design artificially intelligent automation in a way that human beings are mentally and emotionally able to master each situation. (ii) Identify technical design principles to facilitate the responsible use of AI in defense. (iii) Guarantee that human decision-makers always have full superiority of information, decision-making, and options of action over an opponent. The Ethical AI Demonstrator proposed here for air defense is paving the way by letting soldiers experience the use of AI in the targeting cycle along with associated aspects of stress as realistically as possible.
