Human-Machine Interaction and Human Agency in the Military Domain

Militaries increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for decision support and combat operations. With these practices, AI does not replace humans, but personnel interact with AI technologies more frequently. These interactions introduce distributed agency between humans and machines and have the potential to profoundly alter the quality of human agency in warfare.

In this policy brief, Ingvild Bode argues that accounting for the phenomenon of distributed agency requires going beyond perceiving challenges of human-machine interaction as straightforward problems to solve. Rather, distributed agency needs to be recognized as raising foundational operational, ethical-normative and legal challenges.

“In our introduction to CIGI’s The World Votes, 2024 series last February, we wrote: ‘One year from now, people could inhabit very different political worlds than the ones that currently exist.’ We were right about that! But what role did digital tech play? Let’s consider by revisiting what we set out to learn in this comment series, and what we did not foresee.”

Last year, half the world’s population went to the polls. This commentary by Heidi Tworek and Chris Tenove is the final in a series from CIGI, created in partnership with the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia to explore the intersection of technology with the most pivotal among these elections.

“It is tempting to dismiss his threats as the ramblings of a fevered and unfocused mind. However, in his determination to take the United States back to the 1950s — before the Civil Rights Act, before women’s rights and before environmental regulations — the incoming president could inadvertently return the world to the 1930s. This outcome should not be discounted. History, sadly, is often shaped not by careful consideration, but by backroom blundering that results in unintended consequences.”

In this opinion, James A. Haley considers the re-election of Donald Trump, and the significant changes it portends. “While it is too early to say what resemblance the economic policies of a Trump 2.0 administration will bear to the inchoate pronouncements made on the campaign trail, it is clear that the global economy is about to confront serious macroeconomic challenges.”

“For much of the past century, the United States has been a global leader in technological innovation, thanks in no small part to its enormous military-industrial complex. Over much of that same period, America’s government has become mired in bureaucratic inertia. In the wake of Trump’s efforts to break the ‘deep state,’ this could all change,” writes Daniel Araya.

“Silicon Valley is likely to be key to overhauling the country’s antiquated government....its expertise in software automation could radically transform how America’s government functions.” The only real question, Araya says, “is whether the tech industry can be trusted with advancing the public good if it conflicts with Silicon Valley’s bottom line.”

In 2018, Trump imposed tariffs on Canadian exports of steel and aluminum under the national security provision, and Canada retaliated tit-for-tat. Canadian officials have indicated they will follow the same route again. But that is not the correct response this time around, Dan Ciuriak writes, in this op-ed first published in The Globe and Mail.

Ciuriak says a better course is to “finally devote our industrial-policy resources toward leveraging our comparative advantage in technology. Stop the subsidization of foreign multinationals, which allows them to leverage their intangible assets, and redirect those subsidies to scale Canadian start-ups into Canadian giants....Canada should take a page from the best America has to offer, to fight off the worst.”