The ethics of AI-assisted warfighter enhancement research and experimentation: Historical perspectives and ethical challenges

The military applications of AI raise myriad ethical challenges. Critical among them is how AI integrates with human decision making to enhance cognitive performance on the battlefield. AI applications range from augmented reality devices to assist learning and improve training to implantable Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) to create bionic “super soldiers.” As these technologies mature, AI-wired warfighters face potential affronts to cognitive liberty, psychological and physiological health risks and obstacles to integrating into military and civil society during their service and upon discharge. Before coming online and operational, however, AI-assisted technologies and neural interfaces require extensive research and human experimentation. Each endeavor raises additional ethical concerns that have been historically ignored thereby leaving military and medical scientists without a cogent ethics protocol for sustainable research. In this way, this paper is a “prequel” to the current debate over enhancement which largely considers neuro-technologies once they are already out the door and operational. To lay the ethics foundation for AI-assisted warfighter enhancement research, we present an historical overview of its technological development followed by a presentation of salient ethics research issues (ICRC, 2006). We begin with a historical survey of AI neuro-enhancement research highlighting the ethics lacunae of its development. We demonstrate the unique ethical problems posed by the convergence of several technologies in the military research setting. Then we address these deficiencies by emphasizing how AI-assisted warfighter enhancement research must pay particular attention to military necessity, and the medical and military cost-benefit tradeoffs of emerging technologies, all attending to the unique status of warfighters as experimental subjects. Finally, our focus is the enhancement of friendly or compatriot warfighters and not, as others have focused, enhancements intended to pacify enemy warfighters.