Lukas Pöhler

Lukas Pöhler, Valentin Schrader, Alexander Ladwein et al.

Potential malicious misuse of civilian artificial intelligence (AI) poses serious threats to security on a national and international level. Besides defining autonomous systems from a technological viewpoint and explaining how AI development is characterized, we show how already existing and openly available AI technology could be misused. To underline this, we developed three exemplary use cases of potentially misused AI that threaten political, digital and physical security. The use cases can be built from existing AI technologies and components from academia, the private sector and the developer-community. This shows how freely available AI can be combined into autonomous weapon systems. Based on the use cases, we deduce points of control and further measures to prevent the potential threat through misused AI. Further, we promote the consideration of malicious misuse of civilian AI systems in the discussion on autonomous weapon systems (AWS).

Lukas D. Pöhler, Klaus Diepold, Wendell Wallach

Autonomous and intelligent systems (AIS) facilitate a wide range of beneficial applications across a variety of different domains. However, technical characteristics such as unpredictability and lack of transparency, as well as potential unintended consequences, pose considerable challenges to the current governance infrastructure. Furthermore, the speed of development and deployment of applications outpaces the ability of existing governance institutions to put in place effective ethical-legal oversight. New approaches for agile, distributed and multilevel governance are needed. This work presents a practical framework for multilevel governance of AIS. The framework enables mapping actors onto six levels of decision-making including the international, national and organizational levels. Furthermore, it offers the ability to identify and evolve existing tools or create new tools for guiding the behavior of actors within the levels. Governance mechanisms enable actors to shape and enforce regulations and other tools, which when complemented with good practices contribute to effective and comprehensive governance.