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Introduction to ethics in the use of AI in war

A quick tour through the ethical and governance issues

Abhishek Gupta
Towards Data Science
18 min readFeb 24, 2021

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Part 1 : Quick Basics and Advantages & Costs

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

Advances in AI have spilled over into usage in defense applications and there are rightly many ethical concerns that it raises. While there are many detailed documents available that talk about specific areas of concern in the use of AI in warfighting application, I’d like to give here an overview of those issues and talk about some basic ideas that will help you discuss and address issues in the space in a more informed manner.

Let’s talk through the following items to build up an understanding of why the use of AI in war raises so many ethical concerns:

  1. Quick basics
  2. Advantages vs. costs
  3. Current limitations of ethics principles
  4. Key issues
  5. Open questions

In Part 1 (this article), we will cover bullets 1 and 2 and will cover bullets 3–5 in Parts 2 and 3.

Before we dive in, a short post here can’t be comprehensive so if you find things that are missing and that can be expanded upon, please don’t hesitate in leaving a comment and sharing resources so that we can all build our…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Abhishek Gupta
Abhishek Gupta

Written by Abhishek Gupta

SE #machinelearning @Microsoft | Founder @mtlaiethics | #AI #Ethics researcher @mcgillu | @mcgillu grad #deeplearning

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