Conflict Contestable Military AI

In the race for technological supremacy, setting up and enforcing legal and ethical accountability frameworks for how technology is constructed and deployed in warfare is unsettled. In the case of key enabling technologies such as AI, several challenges have to be addressed simultaneously since the technology not only has to combine product safety aspects with ethical and human rights aspects but, when deployed for military purposes, also has to answer to international law. As current legislation is lagging behind technological development, legal and ethical contestation will follow, and testing AI development and deployment against the current or initial legislation on AI will most likely need case-by-case court interpretation. In the case of military AI, this contestation will be influenced by the just war or humanitarian argument reasoning.