Today we are publishing a new EFF white paper, The Cautious Path to Strategic Advantage: How Militaries Should Plan for AI. This paper analyzes the risks and implications of military AI projects in the wake of Google's decision to discontinue AI assistance to the US military's drone program and adopt AI ethics principles that preclude many forms of military work.
The key audiences for this paper are military planners and defense contractors, who may find the objections to military uses of AI from Google's employees and others in Silicon Valley hard to understand. Hoping to bridge the gap, we urge our key audiences to consider several guiding questions. What are the major technical and strategic risks of applying current machine learning methods in weapons systems or military command and control? What are the appropriate responses that states and militaries can adopt in response? What kinds of AI are safe for military use, and what kinds aren't?
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