Meaningful human command: Advance control directives as a method to enable moral and legal responsibility for autonomous weapons systems
This work tackles the problem of accountability in autonomous warfare for military and legal stakeholders, but it appears incremental as it adapts an existing legal concept to a new domain.
The chapter addresses the challenge of ensuring moral and legal responsibility for autonomous weapons systems operating outside real-time constraints by proposing 'advance control directives' (ACDs) as a method to authorize actions in advance, drawing on the precedent of medical advance care directives.
21st Century war is increasing in speed, with conventional forces combined with massed use of autonomous systems and human-machine integration. However, a significant challenge is how humans can ensure moral and legal responsibility for systems operating outside of normal temporal parameters. This chapter considers whether humans can stand outside of real time and authorise actions for autonomous systems by the prior establishment of a contract, for actions to occur in a future context particularly in faster than real time or in very slow operations where human consciousness and concentration could not remain well informed. The medical legal precdent found in 'advance care directives' suggests how the time-consuming, deliberative process required for accountability and responsibility of weapons systems may be achievable outside real time captured in an 'advance control driective' (ACD). The chapter proposes 'autonomy command' scaffolded and legitimised through the construction of ACD ahead of the deployment of autonomous systems.