US Air Force Academy professor Dr. Kerry Chávez is back on the show to pick up where we left off in our last conversation: the ethical considerations, quandaries and pitfalls surrounding drones, AI, and other emerging tech in their military applications.

While a lot of attention has been focused on armed drone use in war zones, there’s a whole realm of military application that drones and emerging autonomous vehicles that may be less visible to the public eye and cadres of armchair generals on X: medivac, ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), C2 (command and control), and other many other “back end” elements of military logistics. 

While these non-kinetic applications for emerging technology may appear at first blush to be ethically and morally neutral. However, when considering things like the field performance (and limitations) of these vehicles, the potential for bias in data being fed into them, and the still nascent norms, legal, and regulatory components governing their use by states (nonstate actors are a whole other consideration) Kerry suggests that there’s more of the ethical and moral here than meets the eye. 

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