SISSC 2024 Opening Keynote

"Rise of the Machines?  Opportunities and Challenges on the AI-Enabled Battlefield"

Abstract:
The advent of more powerful and sophisticated intelligent systems has led to the deployment of operational systems with remarkable autonomous capabilities across many fields, including transportation, space exploration, manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare, environmental monitoring, cybersecurity, and even defense.  These intelligent systems have improved the efficiency, effectiveness, and precision of tasks previously performed by humans by moving more of the repetitive, high-accuracy, or time-critical decisions out of the control of a human pilot, driver, or machine operator and into a domain governed by an algorithm that can learn from the environment, make an assessment of the situation, decide on a course of action, and execute that course of action much faster than any human could.  As a result of this type of decision automation, humans have sent spacecraft billions of miles from Earth to conduct reconnaissance on planets and their moons, built self-driving cars that safely move passengers from place to place, and fully autonomous robotic surgical systems that could operate on a patient with minimal human input.
When it comes to defense-related systems, however, the fact that we can deploy an intelligent system or AI-enabled capability to the battlefield doesn’t necessarily mean that we should deploy that capability -- even if it gives our side a military advantage over the adversary.  By their very nature, military systems designed to inflict lethal force must also be used in accordance with the law of war, applicable treaties, and humanitarian law.
For this talk, we will examine recent advancements in the decision-making capabilities of intelligent systems on the battlefield using Colonel John Boyd’s Observe-Orient-Decide-Act decision process as a frame of reference.  In addition, we will explore the challenges of leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities for decision support in lethal systems, given difficulties in data collection, data cleaning, algorithm training, and achieving a sufficiently low error rate.  Finally, we will consider the legal and moral implications of deploying lethal intelligent systems on the battlefield and recommend areas for further research.

Bio:
Dr. James M. Taylor, Jr. (Jim) serves as Deputy Executive Director of the Nebraska Defense Research Corporation (NDRC), a non-profit affiliate of the University of Nebraska.
In this role, Jim supports NDRC’s mission to provide subject matter expertise, capability demonstrations, and market research in the Command, Control, and Communications (C3) and other mission domains for our United States Strategic Command sponsor.  
Prior to joining NDRC in 2021, Jim served as the Director for STRATCOM Mission Systems of the National Strategic Research Institute (NSRI) and as a Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on research projects involving consequence management, decision support, information technology and operational technology cybersecurity, and civilian leadership development.  Additionally, Jim spearheaded the establishment of NSRI’s Academic Wargaming Center, in coordination with University of Nebraska researchers, and developed innovative wargaming tools to build capacity in decision making, critical thinking, and creative problem solving.  
Jim brings 20 years of active duty U.S. Air Force developmental engineering and acquisition experience to the NDRC team, having retired in 2012 at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.  Dr. Taylor holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and a Doctorate of Computer Engineering from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln.