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Responsibility Practices and Unmanned Military Technologies

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Abstract

The prospect of increasingly autonomous military robots has raised concerns about the obfuscation of human responsibility. This papers argues that whether or not and to what extent human actors are and will be considered to be responsible for the behavior of robotic systems is and will be the outcome of ongoing negotiations between the various human actors involved. These negotiations are about what technologies should do and mean, but they are also about how responsibility should be interpreted and how it can be best assigned or ascribed. The notion of responsibility practices, as the paper shows, provides a conceptual tool to examine these negotiations as well as the interplay between technological development and the ascription of responsibility. To illustrate the dynamics of responsibility practices the paper explores how the introduction of unmanned aerial vehicles has led to (re)negotiations about responsibility practices, focusing particularly on negotiations within the US Armed Forces.

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Notes

  1. Carrigan et al. (2008) provide an illustration of the interdependencies and the distributed responsibilities that make it a challenging endeavor to figure out who and what caused a UAV crash to occur. As the paper shows a pilot error is often also the result of various mishaps and oversights by other human actors, such supervisors and interface designers.

  2. Even when technology is not the main issue, we have responsibility strategies that do not require direct control. The notion of command responsibility in military organizations stipulates that commanding officers are responsible for the actions of their unit. Although they cannot directly control the actions of the men and women under their command and the technologies they work with, they are responsible for creating the conditions for soldiers to behave appropriately (Doty and Doty 2012).

  3. For an overview of the tasks of the pilot and sensor operator of a MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper see (Chapelle et al. 2010, 2011).

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SES 1058457. This work took place at the University of Virginia.

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    Merel Noorman

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Noorman, M. Responsibility Practices and Unmanned Military Technologies. Sci Eng Ethics 20, 809–826 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-013-9484-x

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