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Military artificial intelligence as power: consideration for European Union actorness

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Abstract

The article focuses on the inconsistency between the European Commission’s position on excluding military AI from its emerging AI policy, and at the same time EU policy initiatives targeted at supporting military and defence elements of AI on the EU level. It leads to the question, what, then, does the debate on military AI suggest to the EU’s actorness discussed in the light of Europe as a power debate with a particular focus on Normative Power Europe, Market Power Europe, and Military Power Europe. By employing discourse analysis, the article examines the EU’s AI strategic discourse, consisting of selected AI-related policy documents from different EU institutions. As a result, the article proposes the Military Power Europe definition based on four categories proposed from the Europe as power debate: ways of action, self-definition, preferred international engagement, and the role of the military. It argues that alongside normative proposals for military AI governance, there are evident desires for militarization in the context of AI development, and a considerable role for the military in the future directions of the EU’s digital and security policies. Despite the inconsistency among EU institutions, military AI appears to be actively discussed within the selected discourse, and so is a part of the EU’s emerging AI policy.

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Notes

  1. The article follows the actor definition of AI. Different EU institutions define it differently, in some cases even in the same document. For the EC, AI is described as a collection of technologies that combine data, algorithms and computing power (White Paper, 2020). At the same time, the EP (2021) suggests a definition of ‘AI system’ that is either software-based or embedded in hardware devices, and which displays behaviour simulating intelligence by collecting and processing data, analysing and interpreting its environment, and by taking action, with some degree of autonomy, to achieve specific goals. The European Defence Agency (EDA) describes AI as the capability of algorithms to select optimal or quasi-optimal choices to achieve specific goals.

  2. Communication COM (2018)795 ‘Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence’, European Commission, 2018; Communication (2019)168 ‘Building Trust in Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence’, European Commission, 2018; Communication COM (2018)237 ‘Artificial Intelligence for Europe’, European Commission, 2018; White Paper COM (2020)65 ‘On Artificial Intelligence – A European Approach to Excellence and Trust’, European Commission, 2020a, b; Communication COM (2020)66 A ‘European Strategy for Data Communication’, European Commission, 2020a, b; COM (2021)205 ‘Fostering a European approach to Artificial Intelligence’, European Commission, 2021.

  3. The European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of the European Union, the EU Institute for Security Studies, the European Defence Agency, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, the EU Agency for Cybersecurity, the High-Level Expert Group (an independent body established by the European Commission).

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Funding

This study was supported by Charlemagne Prize Academy under Grant Agreement 28/10/2021.

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  1. Vilnius University, Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Justinas Lingevicius

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Lingevicius, J. Military artificial intelligence as power: consideration for European Union actorness. Ethics Inf Technol 25, 19 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-023-09684-z

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