AI, war and (in)humanity: the role of human emotions in military decision-making

Contemporary armed conflicts are increasingly complex and, through rapid technological development, increasingly remote. This calls into question the capacity of a machine to apply human emotional traits such as empathy and caution, crucial for effective judgement and evaluation in challenging situations. Despite the precision and reliability that might be achieved through the increased automation of military activities such as target identification, from a humanitarian perspective, outsourcing such high-stakes decisions to machines is highly problematic.

In this post, Dr Joanna Wilson, Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of Scotland, calls for the urgent ‘rehumanization’ of military decision-making. Emotions play a key role in this. While sometimes blamed for unpredictable, erratic human behaviour, for which a machine might therefore be viewed to be a welcome alternative, emotions are indispensable for effective and flexible moral reasoning, intuition, and self-regulation. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) should thus be exclusively limited to effectively supplementing and facilitating human agency and decision-making: a technological means for strictly human ends.