The Warfighter's Tolerance for Autonomy and Its Importance in Strategy and Systems Development
Principal Investigator: Jai Galliot, The University of South Wales
Years of Award: 2018-2021
Managing Service Agency: Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Project Description:
Autonomous systems are here, but until all automatable elements of a nation's defenses have been automated, difficult and disruptive decisions will need to be made in which the gain to be derived from said systems is weighed against the implications of their adoption for human workforces. Relevant stakeholders have typically sought to understand the human-machine relationship as a matter of trust applied to individual technologies – a technical challenge for human-machine interaction experts and engineers, with this reflected in relevant strategy documents as technical goals. Our project takes as its starting point that engineering is merely one part of the challenge and that trust and its relation to autonomy ought to be understood in a much broader socio-philosophical context, defined by an undiagnosed and highly original power process, hypothesized to be related to the capacity of warfighter's to tolerate subjection to technology. This power process offers an innovative way of uniting, and more completely understanding, the assorted policy and design issues facing the DoD as it expands the operational uses of autonomy, from its psychological impact to influences on the relevant moral norms.
Select Publications:
Galliott, Jai. 2019. "The Soldier’s Tolerance For Autonomous Systems". De Gruyter.
Jevglevskaja, Natalia, and Jai Galliott. 2019. "Airmen And Unmanned Aerial Vehicles". Indo-Pacific Affairs 2 (3).