Jovana Davidovic

Horizon scanning is intended to identify opportunities and threats associated with technology, regulatory, and social change. Here, we report the results of a new horizon scan based on inputs of an international group of 33 participants, focusing on future issues arising from the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) for augmenting human performance. The final list of 12 issues includes topics spanning from the political (educating and training individuals to accept and work with AI), to the regulatory (issues of consent to human-AI teaming and hybridization), to security (the hackability of neural devices that connect to AI), to philosophical (the nature and phenomenology of brain-to-brain interfaces). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policymakers, military practitioners, and the wider public.

Horizon scanning is intended to identify opportunities and threats associated with technology, regulatory, and social change. Here, we report the results of a new horizon scan based on inputs of an international group of 33 participants, focusing on future issues arising from the military use of artificial intelligence (AI) for augmenting human performance. The final list of 12 issues includes topics spanning from the political (educating and training individuals to accept and work with AI), to the regulatory (issues of consent to human-AI teaming and hybridization), to security (the hackability of neural devices that connect to AI), to philosophical (the nature and phenomenology of brain-to-brain interfaces). The early identification of such issues is relevant to researchers, policymakers, military practitioners, and the wider public.

Bio-convergent enhancements for soldiers are becoming increasingly inevitable. Medical professionals, bioethicists, lawyers, and neuroscientists are increasingly aware of the potential for these enhancements to raise significant ethical issues, especially around issues of consent and responsibility for long-term care. This has, in the last few years, led to an increase in research on the ethics of soldier enhancements. The literature on this issue has rightly leveraged decades of bioethics, medical ethics, and research ethics literature. What is missing however from the literature is the perspective of the potential subjects of such enhancements, namely members of special operations forces. This paper seeks to fill this gap, by first arguing that subjective views of special operations members matter for ethical questions and then by reporting results of our interview-based qualitative study on United States Special Operations Forces’ perspectives on consent and long-term care.