The Human in the Loop

Everyone agrees a person must stay in the loop before a machine kills. Through the first weeks of the war in Gaza, one did. He had about twenty seconds, and the question he had been left to answer was whether the voice sounded male.

A course on the thought of Autonomous Warfare.

Course outline

1. Twenty Seconds — In the first weeks of the war in Gaza an Israeli intelligence officer had about twenty seconds to approve each name a machine put in front of him. What he was checking in those twenty seconds is the…
2. The Man Who Built the First One — The problem of a machine that decides faster than a person can object was solved, named and warned about by the mathematician who invented automated targeting — in a paper about anti-aircraft guns…
3. A Number Written in Advance — Before any officer sat down with any name, someone had decided how many civilians a given class of target was worth. Anscombe's 1957 definition of murder turns out to hinge not on that number but on…
4. A Rating from 1 to 100 — Before the strike and before the directive, a machine scored a population. Every criticism of that scoring in general circulation is an accuracy criticism, and Kant supplies the only one that would…
5. What "Ninety Percent" Does Not Mean — The technical guts of the thing, and the module where the tracking condition earns its keep. A number everyone repeats turns out not to be a specification at all, and the most damning fact about the…
6. Nobody Holds Both — The second condition, taken at its word — including the clause everyone skips over, which is the one the black box defeats. Then the thing the whole instrument cannot do, and it is the reason to be…
7. Rule by Nobody — Who has bought the same arrangement since, and then the sentence to leave holding — that a gap where responsibility should be is not a hole in a form of government but a form of government. And one…

Part of the Symposium course library.