For two articles on the growing threat posed by new military technologies and how they shape contemporary war fighting in Ukraine, Gaza and beyond, PLATFORM WARS' Marijn Hoijtink spoke to the Belgian newspaper Knack.
In both articles, she highlights how the use of AI in military decision-making processes and its integration into autonomous weapons systems are becoming increasingly apparent in wars across the globe, with Gaza and Ukraine serving as real-world testing grounds for new war fighting technologies. The articles address a wide range of topics, ranging from concrete technological capabilities and their deployment, the central role of private firms like Google or Palantir, but also civilian engineers and programmers in these developments, how Belgium and the EU are responding to it, and, essentially, the fundamental ethical questions raised by the incorporation of AI into the ‘kill chain’. Here, Marijn invalidates the popular argument of ‘precise and clean’ warfare, emphasizing the actual realities of algorithmic wars:
“The reality is that these weapons are often used in ways that actually cause more casualties – both in Gaza and Ukraine, the human toll is extremely high. AI enables attacks on a much larger scale because the technology generates many more targets much faster than humans can. Moreover, military personnel hide behind the supposed precision and statistical relevance of AI systems. In other words, they acknowledge that the models are not entirely accurate, but accept them because they work in most cases. In this way,responsibility for civilian casualties is shifted onto the technology.”
Check out the two articles in Dutch here:
