Just War Principles Applied to Drone and AI Warfare - Prof. Michael Krom

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To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at tomysticinstitute.org. - I'm excited for this opportunity to speak with you and really to show how these just-war principles that coin is formulated almost 800 years ago are and with the broader philosophy of natural law thinking and virtue ethics are still relevant today and in need of updating in light of current technologies and international relations and the modern nation state. So that's what we're gonna be trying to do tonight is to develop these principles. Let me say a little bit about how I got interested in the topic, then we're gonna review the traditional principles, you know, very quickly. And then we'll look at the principles as applied to drone warfare and then at AI warfare. And you'll see, there are a lot of them. And that's my contribution is those principles, I think they're 15 totals, that's a lot. So we're gonna go fairly quickly through them. But first in terms of my interest, so I teach at St Vincent College outside of Pittsburgh and we're an interesting place that we are in the one hand a very small college, especially compared to Cornell, some 1500 students, but we also have a seminary, we also have a monastery and a parish and our Benedictine monastery is the largest Benedictine monastery in the world. So in terms of the importance in the Benedictine world, St Vincent is a very important place for the Benedictine spiritual tradition. So in that setting, I had a seminarian who had been in the Air Force, I had then felt the call to the priesthood and wants to be a military chaplain and so asked if he could do an independent study on just war. So I'm much more of a general history of moral and political philosophy, kind of a professor and researcher, it gave me an opportunity to look at some of the contemporary work and I gave a series of talks on that, so I've given version of this talk before. And a text that helped me to get into it, which I'll mention a little bit later, is by Joseph Choppa is remote warfare moral, weighing issues of life and death from 7,000 miles. So how did I get introduced to that? You would think that professors love to go to bookstores, that they go to places like Downtown, Ithaca, they see a bookstore and they're so excited. I am not like those professors, I see them, I get depressed, I think of all the books that I've not read, that I should have read, that I wish I knew, that I'm an imposter and so forth, right? And so I try to avoid this kind of experience. So I decided, my wife wanted to go to the bookstore in town, I went down there and I saw this book and it became, okay, this is actually something I'm really interested in, him explaining how our US military uses drones, at least the specific type that we're gonna be talking about, and also the moral principles behind that. Finally, most recently, Pope Leo the 14th issued an encyclical this summer, Magnificah Humane Toss on preserving our dignity, in the digital age, and so that provided really the focus. Those of you who might wanna go into research of some sort, this is often the sort of thing you need, that somebody's written an article or a book, or in this case, an encyclical, and you then have an opportunity to respond to it. And I think that the Holy Father's remarks, even though they're very brief, he's not really talking about just war, except in a very small section, but that opens up the door for a development of church teaching on this issue. So let's start with that first quote there, in the introduction, it should be on your handout number one. A, today more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, is important to reaffirm that the quote unquote just war theory, which is all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. Humanity possesses far more effective and capable tools for promoting human life and resolving conflicts such as dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. So there's disagreements in Catholic circles about what Holy Father is really going back to the mid-20th century with Paul VI, had been saying about this tradition of just war teaching. Some argue that a new approach to war should be taken, just peace is the term that they used for that. I am with people like Gregory Reichberg and others, Peter Simpson, who would say that no, that the issue is not a need to jettison the teaching but to update it. And I'm not going to try to argue that tonight, but if you want to get into the Q&A in terms of what Holy Father's have said, be happy to do that, that what I would argue instead is that what's been outdated is an approach to just war that has removed its natural law and virtue ethics foundation. And although I only say a little about this tonight, and has also removed the higher direction of justice to charity, right, that the idea that thinking about what justice is requires taking a higher view and the Catholic understanding that grace perfects nature, that by removing that, we've also removed really lost our dignity and lost our humanity in the way that this just war tradition has been problematically applied. All right, with that in mind, I am going to look, then you'll see on the handout there, section number two, there, the use, odd, valum, and use in bella, bella criteria of just war theory. So basically, the idea then is that it's one thing to talk about what is necessary in a moral sense to go to war, what justifies the decision to go to war, once we're in a war, and that's, excuse me, use in odd bella, once we're in a war, what is morally acceptable to do with the use of violence, and that would be use in bella. What I'm focusing on is use in bella. So assuming we have a just cause, which the Holy Father has said, self-defense in the strict sense. So assuming we have a just cause, what is morally acceptable to do in terms of the use of drones and AI. But let's just look at those pretty quickly here, on the side of the right to go to war, and this is where Aquinas really is still being used today. We have three primary principles. We need a just cause. We need right intention, and we need proper authority in order to declare a war. There are also what people, some people, call prudential principles, or secondary principles. And you'll notice the footnote there. This comes from Christopher Toner, who is a philosopher, I think, does a good job of organizing these principles. Proportionality and last resort. We'll be talking about proportionality here with use in bella. Okay, so that's what you need to establish in order to go to war. Once we are in a war, what are the principles that need to be applied? And if you see on the right hand side of the column, and we're going to look at some, we'll define them, discrimination, right intention, lawful command structure, proportionality, and military necessity. One thing I do want to warn though, is that I think that at least some of the abuse of just for teaching is the idea that this is just a protocol checklist. We just kind of check these things off, and that the capping intellectual tradition would emphasize the need for character formation. We need virtues such as prudence in order to determine how to apply these principles. So it's not simply that we just go through the list and do them, think of something like a medical practitioner who needs to take this list, and they take the list appropriate to their field, and make prudential decisions about how to apply them. So we want to be aware of that sort of issue here. Okay, so let's go over just a few of these here. If we go to the back of the handout on page two, you'll see the term discrimination. Notice that in general, we use the word discrimination to be a bad thing, right? It is wrong to discriminate. Discrimination is being used here positively as I have on the handout, only those liable to attack, where liability is established by contributing to injustice can be targeted. So we can say in general, we mean civilians, innocent people, but there are exceptions to that, but generally that we need to discriminate against those who are justly attacked versus those who are innocent and cannot be intentionally targeted. Second thing, proportionality. There are two senses of this term. The violence used in war must be proportionate to the violence and enemy inflicted or threatened. Both in the sense that an unnecessary use of violence is incompatible with the intention of peace, and in the sense that the anticipated harm to non-combatants into civilian resources. forces must be the least possible to achieve peace. So in the first sense, some people, or many people, would argue that chemical weapons, atomic weapons, landmines, we're going to talk about dragon drones tonight being used in the Ukraine war, that the use of these is always unacceptable, that the use of them is always a violation of proportionality. We are maiming or harming the enemy in ways that are unnecessary. In the second sense, the least possible in terms of the intended side effects, that's going to get us into the principle of double effect. And one thing I'll mention just to pause is, as a good example of what is right in terms of declaring war versus what is right in war, is that Sherman's march to the sea and Sherman's strategy more broadly is often used as an example of a violation of proportionality and discrimination, that we can't target civilians. The idea, which we have to say also, our U.S. Air Force, began to slip into in World War II bombing, that we are trying to destroy the morale of the citizens of an enemy nation by attacking civilian centers, that this is a violation of these principles. So even if you have a just cause, that these principles are a question of what's possible to do in achieving those ends. Okay, so double effect. This is an important principle we'll find ourselves going back to a few times tonight. What is double effect in war? One can inflict violence when the side effect of harm or death to the innocents, those not liable to be attacked, can be foreseen. If and only if one intends a good moral object does not intend the side effect, the side effect is not a means to the intended effect. One has a proportionally grave reason for permitting the side effect and the violence is militarily necessary. So I think a pretty clear case version for us would be let's imagine there is a dangerous person in a civilian area. We can't fire, a sniper can't fire into the crowd trying to hit that target, that would be using an innocent person's body and their life as a means to hitting somebody else. It's very different from we have a hostage situation where though we know there is a danger that our sniper might fire and might actually harm a civilian, in some cases it would be more acceptable to fire. So that's the general sort of principle here applying it is very difficult to do. Okay, so now let's get to these principles, the use and bail principles as applied to drone warfare. As I mentioned, Joseph Choppa's book I think is a really helpful guide, I've structured the work that I'm doing around it by a large agreeing and criticize him in certain points. And first, so he not only is he a combat drone pilot, he's a veteran, but he has a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, so there's a rare combination of someone who works on just word teaching and philosophy and also has combat experience. And that experience allows him to provide an introduction to how the military uses fighter jet-sized drones, okay, the principles that guide, attack decisions and specific examples. We'll use really one I think is most helpful for us tonight. A third reason Choppa I think is very helpful is that he's really attentive to the need for moral formation and soldiers, that particularly in drone warfare, there are psychological issues that make it especially important to attend to the formation of soldiers. And I think he's very good on doing that. Okay, so now what is the, what is that fighter jet-sized drone that he's focused on? At that time, it was called the Predator. And as Choppa says, it's the aircraft that defined the genre of American drone warfare. Ever since 9/11, it has been a shift in our US military strategy from targeting things to targeting people. We're going to be looking thinking about, for example, a non-state actor or terrorist as we would often say. For those of you interested in or concerned about the September 15th announcement that the US has weapons in space, it's not clear what those are. They haven't said what those are. I think the principles we're going to talk about here would also apply to that. You're thinking about something sort of like that, right, where we have a weapon that is far removed from the people operating it. Okay, another thing to mention, for those of you who are in tech or really thinking about the technology here, the Reaper is the next generation of the fighter jet-sized plane that we are currently using. And if the reports can be believed, about 25% of our fleet has been shot down by the Iranian military at the cost of about $700 million. And so there's a question now of whether or not our strategy of using these, which is shifting in that war to targeting things once again, is going to prove to be ineffective that we're going to go back to using them to target outside of military context, in many cases in civilian areas, you know, enemies of the state. Although there's a new one, the Avenger that was, I think it was last a year ago in the fall that is now kind of getting close to use, and there's a question of what the next generation will hold. So it's hard to keep up with the technology, but for those of you who are interested in that, you can see how some of this may shift with the new technologies. Okay, so the hook for his book that I think will help us to really think about the kind of situation we're thinking about is in 2013, Choppa was called in as the safety observer on a predator strike against a senior alchieta commander in Afghanistan who was standing outside his desert home. The special operations crew on the ground, so there's a crew on the ground, Choppa and the pilots are in the United States, 7,000 miles away. The crew on the ground requests that the pilots in the U.S. gave Brown immediately fire on the alchieta commander, despite the fact that he was surrounded by his children, saved to think you are being asked to fire into a crowd of innocent people of children. Both of the pilots, who conferred with Brown, agreed that firing the missile was justified in light of the principles of discrimination, were targeting a combatant, and proportionality. Innocent people would die, but they wouldn't be targeted, and it'd be a side effect, that was the way they argued it. Yet Brown took the initiative himself and told the ground crew he would wait up to five minutes before firing in hopes that the children would re-enter the house. Thankfully they did, alchieta commander was killed without any loss of innocent life. So throughout the book, Choppa tells these kind of stories to, on the one hand, illustrate how difficult these decisions are being made by these crews, but also that they're not engaged in kind of like a video game. We have, some people have this idea that these are like 18-year-old boymen who are just kind of happily firing on targets, that these are professionals who are taking very seriously their obligation to think through these distinctions. And if we may disagree with the result they reach, then that's part of the reasonable challenge that we have to face, and deciding how to apply those principles. So remember that situation, kind of think to yourself, do you agree, I mean, do you agree that if they had fired, would that have been acceptable? So the first moral principle, then, on the handout, side two there, in light of that, the training and combat expectations of drone operators must foster the formation of moral judgment. As Choppa goes on to help you get a sense of the scenarios we're talking about, he's trying to make clear the need for virtues, for exercising moral judgment in these difficult situations. And so the idea that the soldier who is somewhere far removed from the battle just needs to be kind of technically proficient is not sufficient for a just war approach. Okay, the second one. With all due respect to the need for the virtue of obedience, in generally defaulting to obeying orders, drone operators must have well-formed consciences and be safeguarded when their moral judgments conflict with those of their peers in commanding officers. And number two there, the right to conscientious objection regarding whether deadly force can be used in a military operation must be safeguarded. So it perhaps is even more important in these cases that we're intentional about the right to conscientiously object to an order. The third one here, having to do with the psychological challenges, I'll just read it. Given the unique psychological challenges the drone operator faces, right intention requires that particular attention be paid to the risk of moral injury and to the need for stable relationships with members of the civilian community. What do I mean by moral injury? Basically the result of having violated your conscience, that we need to be more attentive to this in the case of the drone operator. And one of the arguments he makes, I think there's somewhat compelling, is that at least for some of these men and women, the fact that they can be in a civilian setting in this this context can actually help kind of reground them in the moral principles in a reminder of what we're doing and why we're doing these things and help them to overcome mission drift. It's often this kind of issue that now I guess we're firing on these people. It's not really clear how this fits the mission. So I think that it's not necessarily the case that happens, but we could see how going home to a family or being in a civilian community can help remind someone of the importance for moral formation and in some cases conscientiously objecting to orders. Okay, while those first three principles really have to do with the formation of the drone operators, we're now going to talk about the acts of violence themselves. What principles do we need for drone warfare to morally govern the use of violence? I think as Chopper rightly argues, the justification for violence in war is not self-defense. It's not the fact that I'm being fired upon personally. That's not the basis. That's true for private life, for civilians, right? But not for military or police. The justification for violence in war is the right of public authority to defend its own people in the name of the common good. And so principle for there, an asymmetrical drone warfare. By asymmetrical, I mean that I'm not in danger. Those men, 7,000 miles away, are not in danger of being harmed personally by those people on the ground they're firing at. So in that asymmetrical situation, the analysis of military necessity, is it necessary to attack these people? Must be made on the basis of the threat combatants post to civilians and not on the basis of military personal or structural risk. Okay. The next one's going to guess a little bit into actually thinking an interesting argument for drone warfare, drone weaponry, over some traditional weaponry. Just the example that I would use. The hellfire missile is what's used on the reaper and on the predator, and then I assume the eventual use of version of that. A hellfire has ranges about five miles and it's going to hit its target in no more than 20 seconds. That's pretty quick, right? A decision is made within 20 seconds, that target will be hit. By contrast, a Tomahawk missile, which we've been using for many, many years, can be fired from a thousand miles away and hit its targets two hours after launch. So if you think that drone warfare is a problem because we're too far removed from the violence, why is firing a missile from a destroyer that's going to hit its target two hours later, not a problem? Today the issue in the war in Iran on the Iranian side is a smaller drone that I think we should really think of just as a missile. It's the Shahad 136, the U.S. has developed the Lucas as kind of a version of this. I guess there's a question of whether or not it can be a loiter. But it basically, it seems to be like this. This missile is fired, traveling at only a hundred to 150 miles an hour and can go about a thousand miles. And in the earlier versions of it, we can't do anything after we let it go. If something changes between now and then, it's going to that target, right? Whereas the drone is actually more under what Shapa calls a reduced judgment gap. What does that mean? The distance between the point of application of human judgment and the effect of that judgment. In the case of drone warfare, at least in these cases, there's a reduced judgment gap over conventional weapons, and this is an argument in their favor. So number five there, with regard to the principle of legitimate command structure. As much as possible, the use and development of drone weaponry must involve the least judgment gap possible, such that moral responsibility for each and every act of violence can be clearly assigned. All right, so now with this next one, I'm going to transition to handheld drones, which he doesn't talk about. He's really only talking with the fighter jet size drones. One of the things I think that's interesting is that we are, appear to be actually witnessing a shift to the pre-9/11 strategy of targeting things rather than people, right? When someone can build a handheld weapon for $1,000 or so and destroy a multi-million-dollar tank, of course, that's going to affect military strategy and what we're going to be targeting. In the last few years, there have been reports of these dragon drones, which are equipped with thermite, which burns at 4,000 plus degrees Fahrenheit, being used by the Ukraine military. And I wouldn't say totally non-controversial, but fairly non-controversial use of it would be to drop it over a line of trees so that we can see the enemy's advancements, but the controversial use of it would be dropping on enemy soldiers. So again, is that a violation of proportionality? That the kind of harm we're inflicting on these soldiers is disproportionate to the threat that they pose. And I'm not going to necessarily advance a position on that, but we can see there is a real question of that. So here's the principle I would develop, number six there. Analysis of discrimination, proportionality, and military necessity must be rooted in right intention, so as to ensure that drone attacks on enemy combatants inflict the least possible harm as is necessary to protect civilians. All right, the next two principles, seven, eight are going to be, I'm going to formulate them really as critiques of chop and then I'll add one more principle and then we'll be done with drone warfare. So the first one, remember that example that he gave of Dave Brown in 2013? Is that a violation of double effect? Remember that double effect does allow us in certain circumstances to while intending a moral good and having a moral object, knowing there's a side effect that we don't intend, that's not a means to that end. Is the issue of firing upon a terrorist, someone who, let's just assume, poses a serious threat to the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, is targeting that person say in a wedding party? Is that a violation? Okay. Joseph Kapizi, I think, is very good on these issues. He's recently moved to the University of Notre Dame to the McGrath Center. It makes to this point that double, that intention isn't just a subjective reality of what's in my head. It does refer to objective facts. Let's imagine that, you know, I were to grab a Cornell student and punch them in the RM and say, "I'm not actually intending to harm you. I'm intending to illustrate the principle of double effect." You're like, "Well, look, I mean, I understand you were trying to make a point, Dr. Cromb, but you can't harm somebody as a means to the good of educating people." Right? That's a violate, even though in my head, I intended not to harm you, but to make a point. So Kapizi didn't say, "Look, we can't just say, 'I'm not intending to kill these people who I'm firing upon.'" Okay. So how do we think this through? And I think that the scholastic, just-word tradition after a coin is really helpful here. I'll give you two examples. Robert Bellarmine argues that, quote, "When a soldier shoots into a battalion of enemies and, by chance, kill civilians, but when he kills them, it doesn't intend to do so. If he has the means to do otherwise, though, he would send." Okay. So this is, I think they issue a lot of us would think of, like, again, the hostage situation. That assuming you have a clean shot, that you've done, you know, everything that you can, or not, shooting through the body of a civilian, then this isn't an acceptable use of double effect. More to the point, Lewiston Molina argues that firing a cannon at an-this is an interesting example. Firing a cannon at an enemy ship that's being roared by slaves, okay? So this enemy ship poses a threat to our well-being, right? They will kill our citizens. We need to stop them. He argues that it would be morally acceptable, despite the fact that those who are wrong the ship will be killed. Okay. That's an interesting example. Again, I'm not saying we can't question whether or not, you know, Molina is correct on that, but it is a helpful example to say that they were really trying to think through examples that are sufficiently similar to what we're talking about today. So what I would do is at least say this, and this is where I am disagreeing with Chapa, is that the late-scholastic analysis assumes a battlefield rather than a civilian context, right? And what we're talking about here is firing upon, perhaps, their combatants, but in civilian context, and that is not morally acceptable, okay? Or at the very least, we would need to factor that in. So again, I would say that we can't make a hard and fast rule on this. It's more of a general guideline, but here's how I'm putting out number seven, and I would welcome your thoughts on this one. A double effect discrimination analysis of drone strikes in civilian areas must meet more stringent standards than in combat zones in order to demonstrate that proportionality and military necessity have been met. So I would say it's one thing to fire at an enemy base knowing that there are hospital workers and janitors who are there who are civilians. It's another thing to fire into a civilian area at a wedding party, that these are those context make the what's necessary to a establish double effect higher. OK, a second critique of Trumpa really has to do more with foreign policy. And the broader question of whether or not we can sufficiently establish justice when we don't couple it with charity. And I think really the concern is I read the book is this, that you can see how a military commander and a political figure would be more likely to engage in violence when civilians will be killed, non-American citizens in this case, because he or she knows that there is no threat to our military. It doesn't cost anything. He won't have to answer to the public in that situation. And that's going to make it more likely that we're going to end up denying the dignity of other people, that we're going to just see them as less valuable as our own military. And I'm not in the military myself. I've not served in the military. So I'm very hesitant to say these things. But we do have to acknowledge that risking the lives of those who are promoting and protecting the justice of our own citizens and of other citizens has to actually be prioritized over the loss of innocent lives even if they're non-US citizens. So I think that's the sort of thing Pope Leo has in mind here. So he talks about here as a quote from him, that the church has a commitment to promote a social order in which justice and charity are intertwined and love becomes the guiding principle of economic, political, and cultural life. A final one here-- actually, I didn't read number eight. So let's read that. Even when military conflict breaks out, right intention requires that diplomacy be viewed as the ordinary means by which conflicts are resolved, rather than the halfway measures of drone warfare. Those tasks with dispute resolution must promote the dignity of the person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiary, solidarity, and justice, and must act on such virtues as charity, friendship, liberality, forgiveness, and mercy that are necessary for the achievement of peace. So we can see how easy this happens for us. So let's just think of like culture wars. How easy it is for us to fall into having bad intention toward those with whom we disagree, right? That we turn maybe even toward hatred toward them, wishing ill upon them. And these are people who just disagree with us. Now imagine thinking about someone who's inflicting violence and who is harming innocent people, how hard it would be for us to maintain justice and charity in that situation. And so we need to really strengthen our resolve to that. All right, let's look now at AI warfare. Mercifully, there's only six principles, which is still a lot. But less than in the case of drone warfare. I want to say a few things. I think probably a lot of people are acknowledging why we need moral guidance in AI. I mean, even if we're just talking about driverless cars and the kinds of the protocols that are followed in a situation where there is a danger to the driver. Maxim Chipolkin, who is at Cambridge University, did a study on how likely an AI device is to declare war in a variety of circumstances. I can give you a list of various AI bots that he used. He ran hundreds of permutations of this. And what he found was that the AI bots universally put a pretty low priority to moral considerations. What was more important to them in terms of should we go to war, where economic considerations, the likelihood of success. And so any attempt then to put moral principles to guide AI, it seems to always have this effect if they get relegated to of secondary importance. And even if we imagined giving all of the moral principle, we just download Aquinas, the scholastics, the development of doctrine, and so forth into them, they of course can achieve moral agency. And it is unnerving. And I actually found students, who is the big first week of the semester, that evidently one of the hot things you open up your account are people asking AI if it would destroy humanity, when, and how. And just finding that every AI had what it would do. And this is pretty concerning. So these are serious researches. This is not just something I'm going to read on Instagram. There's a host of literature by scholars weighing in on the possibility that no matter what moral principles with which we attempt to bind an AI system, it will turn against humanity inevitably if it develops into what's called generality. A single system capable of operating across all domains and performing any tasks within the scope of human intelligence. It just will do it. For example, Wolfhardt Tachnig argues that if this is achieved, humanity will have no choice but to submit to it to AI with the hope of securing peace. His conclusion is alarmed, this is a quote. This piece would make cooperation between us and her-- that's his word, her-- I didn't personify AGI as a woman. He does. That would make cooperation between us and her possible a cooperation that if the enthusiasts of artificial intelligence or to be believed could usher in an era of health and prosperity for humanity. How many Marvel movies begin like this? There is no possible way that my technology could fail and/or in Spider-Man 2 with Dr. Doc Ock. I've just thought of everything here. And there's no way that this could turn against us. And then there's a Jeff Goldblum character who's the nut who is not with the latest technology. It turns out that he's right. So this is the real world. These are real scholars making these arguments. Even though AGI, I would argue, is impossible. Sentient, self-conscious, beings cannot be created by programmers with silicone and so forth. And that's another argument. Even if it's impossible, I do think it's conceivable that a device could be given that kind of control over the infrastructure of a nation or even of a larger international conglomeration. So we do need to be concerned about that. And with that in mind, I'm going to expand upon Leo the 14th, criteria for AGI. He actually does talk about and try to lay out some of these principles for the use of AI violence. All right, so the first two here are really about AI in general. OK. Leo the 14th talks about the threat that AGI can pose to peace like this. Quote, communication networks, fragment and information environments and algorithms that reward conflict can magnify polarization and resentment, increase propaganda, and make shared discernment more difficult in a quote. So we're all aware of this that news agencies get hits and get interest by generating conflict. And so if AI is programmed in the same sort of way, that there's already a moral problem in the way it's programmed. So what's the first principle then? Those human agents tasked with the development and usage of AI for military operations must intend peace. The second one thinking about propaganda and shared discernment. The principle that Coinus talks about is treachery, that even in a war, it's a violation of justice, a violation of morality, to break promises, to engage in lying, which is different from withholding information. So laying ambushes, that's acceptable, but not lying and breaking promises to enemies. So number two then, right intention also requires that dissemination of information through AI respects the obligation to refrain from treachery. So just think about lying in general, right? That when you lie to somebody and they find this out, there's just this riff that's hard to get passed. I just can't trust you anymore. I want to trust you, but I can't, right? It would be actually wrong of me to trust you, given that you have already revealed or admitted that you've lied to me. Once we lie to one another, the possibility of peace, of dialogue, of communication, becomes very difficult to establish. And so if nations engage in distributing false information to one another, in this case, on computer networks, then it's even harder than to establish peace between them and to end the war. And so this right intention, I think, is important. Some of you probably want to be programmers or want to go into some sort of engineering, that it's really easy, probably, for people who do this to say, I just make them. What you do with them, that's up to you, right? I just sell them to whoever will pay for them. And what the Holy Father is offering is that you have to intend them for peace. I don't know where we are in big hero six. Is that a movie, a big hero six that we know? That we need to build these for the sake of the human good. Rather than just an instrument, people can do good or evil with it. That's not on me, right? This is kind of what the drug dealer argues, right? I just deal with what people do with them. That's not on me. OK, so those are the first two principles. Now moving on to the use of AI in autonomous weapon systems, weapons that can fire on targets. I would avoid using the word determine, where to fire, but follow an algorithm where we can't predict what they're going to fire upon. The first principle here, which is number three. on the handout addresses the technological military community of persons as a whole and the need to ensure that everybody involved in autonomous weapon system is aware of the ramifications of their actions as well as their moral responsibilities. Number three, AWS design, training, authorization, and employment must involve a clear and legitimate command structure such that moral responsibility can be assigned to human agents for each and every act of violence. Isn't this what happens in the sci-fi movie is that the weapon or the device, the robot is unleashed and now it's like who's responsible for this? And it's very hard to determine a lot of finger pointing, right? That we really do need to be clear who is responsible for every step along the way. Second criterion for the use of AI in autonomous weapon systems has to do with the moral time frame for making judgments. Okay, so number four there. Rightful intention requires that AWS be designed such that the speed and efficiency of their actions are subordinate to human agency, thus remaining under effective self-aware and responsible human control. And I wish I had read up on this, I saw a little bit of this, but there have evidently been discussions in our military of whether or not a human agent needs to oversee each and every act of violence with an autonomous weapon system. That's a discussion that's being had. And one of the arguments against that saying that we can't do it is we can't keep up. Humans can't make decisions fast enough to decide what to do. And if we're fighting against a weapon system that doesn't have a human in the loop, you know, we're gone, right? We can't keep up with that. And so we absolutely need it. And so this claim then is one that does look like it would make it harder to defend ourselves, right? We don't know to deny that this would actually probably lead to a serious difficulty in combating an enemy that's willing to do anything. And I think this is just the nature of morality. When you stand for something, it means there are people without screwpals who will have an advantage over you in a worldly sense of the term, right? In the physical sense, if not in a spiritual one, of course. Okay. Third, again, thinking about that point, Kapizi makes about drone strikes in civilian areas. AWS must be developed and employed such that non-combatants can be distinguished. And that's number five, the principle of discrimination for personality must be strictly adhered to in designing, training, authorizing, employing AWS. I don't know the technology in this, but I have heard there still are issues evidently of things like there's a child with a toy gun, you know, can the can the weapon system discriminate between that and actually somebody firing? Or cases and again, these are just reports of soldiers who, you know, capitulate, who lay down their weapons and they're fired upon anyway, right? Which is, again, for my generation, that's Robocop, the original Robocop, right? They try to, okay, I surrender and it can't, right? It's not capable of processing that. And so that would of course be a violation of this policy. Okay, the final one there. The need for political oversight of autonomous weapon systems. The design training authorization and employment of AWS must be governed by military policies and international agreements that are rooted in the requisite use and bailable principles. And actually reminds me, I accidentally skipped number nine in the drone warfare here. The obligation to develop ways to use AI and drone and drone weapons and drones to protect civilians, things like warning them of upcoming attacks and actually assisting civilian populations of getting out of the path of violence. All right, so we went through all of them here. Let me wrap up and I look forward to your questions, challenges, comments, and so forth. So the general conclusion I want to make is look the quote on the hand out there. Let's me seem very trivial, but it's actually very important. What is justice? I always say just for three. It's a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will. So when I'm engaged in justice, I'm willing not my good, but you're good. So realizing that in war, we're talking about treating enemies, even enemies who may be killed, we're trying to give them what is theirs. That's very hard to think through what that means. So I think this is where charity becomes important that charity reminds us that our love for the vulnerable as well as the love for our enemies needs to prevail. Overcoming technologies, seductive tendency to make us think that we can obtain peace without involving ourselves in moral formation and prudential reasoning will prove difficult as society outsources more and more of its activities to AI. So I teach ethics class regularly. You wouldn't think you'd have to convince students that you can't outsource your moral formation to an AI agent, but they do, right? They think that I could just look up the moral principles on my computer. I don't need to think for myself about forming my consciousness right and wrong. That's very hard to avoid that temptation. So we need to recommen ourselves to advancing a culture of life so that we can love those who seek to do us harm, praying for them even we must act as killer agents protecting meeclams. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this lecture on the "Tamistic Institute" podcast. The generosity of people like you makes this podcast possible. 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