HuMach. Human-Machine Interaction: The Distributed Agency of Humans and Machines in Military AI

HuMach. Human-Machine Interaction: The Distributed Agency of Humans and Machines in Military AI

Duration: 1 August 2024 – 31 July 2028

Funder: Independent Research Fund Denmark

PI: Professor Ingvild Bode

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into military decision-making raises foundational challenges to the exercise of human agency in warfare. We witness a series of complex practices of human-machine interaction. But current scholarship in International Relations and adjacent social sciences does not yet capture this distributed agency or its consequences for warfare. To address this, HuMach offers novel analytical conceptualizations of distributed agency in warfare, investigates how human-machine interaction affects the deliberative space that can be exercised by humans in warfare, and identifies associated governance demands. Using practices as a sensitising concept, HuMach examines distributed agency empirically by drawing on the Responsible AI agenda that is gaining ground in some Western states.

HuMach is a Sapere Aude project funded by the Independent Research Council Denmark. Apart from a core team of researchers based at SDU, HuMach will collaborate with Professor Denise Garcia at Northeastern University, Associate Professor Katherine Chandler at Georgetown University (in her personal capacity), Associate Professor Anisa Heritage at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (in her personal capacity), and Dr Vincent Boulanin at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).