Elements of an Ethical AI Demonstrator for Responsibly Designing Defence Systems

In order to protect their common heritage of culture, personal freedom, and the rule of law in an increasingly fragile world, democracies must be able to defend themselves “at machine speed” if necessary. The use of AI in defense there-fore comprises responsible weapons engagement as well as military use cases such as logistics, predictive maintenance, intelligence, surveillance or reconnaissance. This poses a timeless question: How to decide well according to what is recognized as true? For approaching towards an answer, responsible control-lability needs to be turned into three tasks of systems engineering: (1) Design artificially intelligent automation in a way that human beings are mentally and emotionally able to master each situation. (2) Identify technical design principles to facilitate the responsible use of AI in defence. (3) Guarantee that human decision makers always have full superiority of information, decision-making, and options of action. The Ethical AI Demonstrator (E-AID) proposed here for air defence is paving the way by letting soldiers experience the use of AI in the targeting cycle along with associated aspects of stress as realistically as possible.