Do Robots Lure Us to War?

The second decade of the 21st century marked the return of great power competition, and artificial intelligence (AI) is its new frontier. One of AI’s most consequential applications could become autonomous weapons systems—military robots controlled by AI algorithms. Existing research suggests that unmanned capabilities might influence decisionmakers’ readiness to deploy lethal force, but the impact remains unclear. In this project, the author developed a framework to define and understand the decision space for the use of force in the presence of emerging technology and applied it to autonomous weapons systems. The author implemented the framework in a game-theoretic model of major power confrontation over a third country.

Overall, the research suggests that innovations in autonomous weapons systems may increase the likelihood of war through three mechanisms—namely, by (1) improving prospects of success, (2) decreasing economic costs of war, and (3) increasing political benefits of fighting. None of these effects is guaranteed; however, each would marginally incentivize U.S. competitors to use force against a third country. The United States can mitigate this risk through technological advancement focused on improving its prospects of success in war and lowering mobilization costs (as opposed to reducing the economic costs of fighting) to increase the credibility of commitment and thus deter aggression. The author found that robotic technology has no significant impact on the Russian public support for military intervention in a proposed scenario. At the same time, the results indicate that the support can be influenced the most through moral arguments.