ArticleHas the race to bring AI technology to the battlefield unleashed a new spirit of aggression that threatens our common humanity?
We now see swarms of attack drones, trained by AI algorithms, hunting together in robotic “wolfpacks”.
Ukrainians have been living under siege, experiencing regular drone-by-night attacks since 2022, with no let-up in sight. Recently Russia deployed 140 of the “Shahed” drones developed by Iran, damaging ports and infrastructure across Ukraine and killing civilians. The US is scratching its head at how much havoc these Shahed drones wreak, with their cheap “motorcycle engine” technology. Sometimes they need to be shot down by a US missile worth more than a million dollars.
Australia and its allies are part of a new arms race, trying to counter Iran and Russia and the swarms of cheap, AI-guided drones they deploy to devastating effect. We’ve already supplied small, lightweight cardboard drones to Ukraine to help it defend itself. Only last November a Ukrainian STING interceptor shot down a Russian jet-powered drone for the very first time, and now STING interceptors have become an integral part of the “game”- when a strike is successful it feels like “scoring a goal”.
Last year the Australian Government announced Mission Syracuse, a drive to create new uncrewed weapons that can “kill” other uncrewed weapons. The government’s Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator will invest $30 million in local firms AIM Defence and SYPAQ Systems to develop new counter-drone technology. We’ve already created lasers capable of tracking objects as small as a 10-cent piece travelling at more than 100km/h and powerful enough to burn through steel. Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy declared “Star Wars” is happening in Australia.
Nations are rushing to update and expand their army of attack drones as well. Auterion, a US company founded in 2017 and now a leading developer of AI-guided autonomous weapons, boasts on its website that its software platform transforms individual drones into “resilient, coordinated swarms across air, land, and sea”. The Ukrainian firm Airlogix have just unveiled the Anubis and the Seth-X, new AI-guided strike drones named after ancient Egyptian gods of death and chaos.
Last weekend Ukraine deployed more than 1,000 long-range drones into Russia over a 24 hour period, killing four people in the Moscow and Belgorod regions. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attacks were a justified response to the Russia’s heavy missile bombardment of Kyiv two days earlier, which levelled residential buildings and killed 24 people. Ukrainian drone attacks have reportedly driven Russian Commander-in-Chief Vladimir Putin to shelter underground wherever he goes.
Ukraine claims that for the last four months it has killed more than 30,000 soldiers a month with drones, more people than Russia can replace with new deployments. Robert Brovdi, Commander of the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces, confirmed to a BBC reporter that Ukraine is flying drones into Russian territory to strike oil refineries and is deliberately targeting Russian soldiers.
Along with the hubris surrounding drone technology, there are some warnings.
AI-guided drones will never “see” what’s happening on the ground in the same way humans do.
They operate according to a “machine realism” that is a black box to humans and sees things that we don’t. Trevor Paglen, artist and investigative journalist, notes the AI propensity to recognise patterns that simply don’t exist, “except within the preserve of a computational illusion or in the pathologies of a mechanically induced delirium”.
Anthony Downey sounds another cautionary note in an article for Digital War.
AI-guided weapons are “hungrier” for targets than we realise. They have an “algorithmic predisposition” to identify the prospect of menace.
And because AI analyses data so quickly, the humans in the decision-making loop feel a knock-on pressure to act decisively. Downey says we are “coerced into an algorithmic radius of presumed threat”, and this has the danger of escalating violence on all sides.
The AI technology that guides attack drones is trained on humans and their behaviour, but it has no real way of understanding the motivations, loves, and desires of the people on the ground; the stories that shape and form each of us. It doesn’t see humans for who we are.
What stories can we deploy to save us from the destruction that we manifest for ourselves in our technology and from the violent gods that we worship? Faith traditions have stories that form a rich anthropology – an understanding of what it means to be a human.
The biblical story, for example, asserts the dignity and worth of all humans as made in the image of God, an unparallelled basis for human dignity and worth. It can serve as a helpful counter to the “machine realism” that works from probabilities and doesn’t care one way or the other about the fate of any particular person.
Could it be that, parallel to this arms race, there is another race: a race to train up humans to recognise our common humanity.
We need to see the faces of our fellow humans outside of the frames of AI technology, which has been primed to sense menace and respond in kind.
The “Just War” conversations within Christian thought could be part of this training and help us shed some of our human hubris and humbly weigh what is at stake as we deploy AI drones in warfare. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), known as the “father” of Just War theory, thought that war could only be just if it responded to the wrongdoing of another side, where there was:
“The desire for harming, the cruelty of revenge, the restless and implacable mind, the savageness of revolting, the lust for dominating, and similar things—these are what are justly blamed in war.”
Arguably, our new target-hungry AI drones have been trained to have such a “restless and implacable mind” as they undertake their long-range missions. Humanity’s cruel and disordered desire for harm, revenge and domination is reflected back to us in our robotic wolfpacks, and it is hard to identify which is the “good” state in a Just War framework when AI drones are on the attack.
I suspect we will need something more than the blind faith of AI companies to navigate the moral complexities of this technological age . We need to find a way to truly “see” the humanity of our fellows on the ground, and to resist our worst human tendencies – our hubris, our suspicion of others and our knee-jerk violence. We need to adjust our frame away from machine realism in order to understand how and why our technology amplifies these worst human tendencies on the battlefield.
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.