Ethical Conditions of the Use of Artificial Intelligence in the Modern Battlefield—Towards the “Modern Culture of Killing”

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) on the modern battlefield causes justified semantic and ethical controversies. Semantic, i.e., relating to meaning, controversies are related to delineating artificial intelligence (AI) used by a human during military operations, e.g., precision weapons capable of independent decision-making about the choice of target; and completely autonomous machines, i.e. thinking and deciding autonomously/independently from the human being. In this broad, and still nascent filed, several legal and ethical challenges emerge. This chapter sheds light on the emerging ethical considerations pertinent to the use of robots and other machines relying on unsupervised learning in resolving conflicts and crises of strategic importance for security.