Utrecht University and the Asser Institute convene a workshop on 13 June to understand and evaluate who are ‘humans’ involved in – or excluded from – the development and use of AI systems in the military domain. The workshop will be combined with a keynote panel on 12 June.

The use of AI in military operations is understood as transforming military capabilities, following the precedents of transformation brought by nuclear, aerospace, cyber, and biotechnologies. Recently, algorithms have been employed at a large scale and in densely populated urban areas, in the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria. In the Gaza war ongoing since October 2023, it has been reported that the Israel Defense Forces used a series of AI-enabled decision support systems (AI-DSS) to generate targets in a manner that ultimately imposed extremely high civilian costs.

Over the last decade, ethical, humanitarian, and legal concerns have been raised with regard to autonomous weapons systems (AWS) and other AI-enabled military systems (such as AI-DSS). A series of diplomatic talks have taken place since 2014 within the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) to discuss potential regulation applicable to ‘lethal’ AWS. ‘Meaningful human control’ has been one of the pillars in the decade-long debate on the regulation of AWS. Several other similar terms have also been used (such as ‘human agency’, ‘appropriate levels of human judgment’, and ‘direct control and supervision of humans’). Yet ‘meaningful human control’ has been given importance both by State and non-governmental organisations at the CCW. The concept has also been used in the discussion of broader AI-enabled military systems, beyond AWS.

This workshop will critically look at the political construction of ‘humans’ involved in – or excluded from – the process of controlling and influencing the development and use of AI-enabled military systems. In a similar vein, the workshop will also look at ‘humans’ who are most affected by the use of such weapon systems as part of ‘human-machine-human interactions’.