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Academics from �鶹��madou and Arizona State University (ASU) have been awarded a multi-year contract by the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pioneer new research in military ethics and autonomous technologies.

The contract was granted through DARPA’s Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) program, which aims to create benchmarks to assess how well autonomous systems, including those employing artificial intelligence (AI), can handle complex, ethically sensitive situations in military settings.

As autonomous technologies evolve, ASIMOV seeks to develop a comprehensive framework that evaluates the ethical readiness, in addition to the technical ability, of these systems to operate in real-world military scenarios.

The research project, Adversarial Generative Ethics for Autonomous Weapon Systems, will be led by Professor Deane-Peter Baker from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at �鶹��madou Canberra. Professor Baker will guide a team of experts from �鶹��madou Canberra’s School of Systems and Computing and �鶹��madou Sydney’s Faculty of Law and Justice, as well as faculty in ASU’s Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming (CHART) who are from ASU’s Department of Psychology; School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy; Polytechnic School; School of Life Sciences; and School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. 

The collaborative effort aims to break new ground by establishing a quantitative approach to measuring the ethical difficulty of future autonomy use-cases and the ability of autonomous systems to perform in those use-cases within the context of military operational values.

Supported by Security & Defence PLuS, a unique trilateral partnership among �鶹��madou, ASU, and King’s College London, the project represents a commitment to advancing shared security and defence priorities for Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as their allies and defence partners worldwide.

“To date, international engagement with the question of the ethical use of autonomous weapons has been at a level of generality," Professor Deane-Peter Baker said.

"This project marks a sea change in seeking to establish a way of evaluating the specific ethical readiness of particular systems for the battlefield. I am honoured to be working alongside an outstanding team of interdisciplinary experts at �鶹��madou and ASU as we seek to make real progress on this vital question.”