DOD Seeks Ethicist to Guide Deployment of Artificial Intelligence

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, stood up just last year, has plans to hire an ethicist to help guide the Defense Department's development and application of artificial intelligence technologies. "One of the positions we are going to fill will be somebody who is not just looking at technical standards, but who is an ethicist," said Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the JAIC's director. "We are going to bring in someone who will have a deep background in ethics, and then the lawyers within the department will be looking at how we actually bake this into the Department of Defense." Speaking Aug. 30 at the Pentagon, Shanahan provided an update on the JAIC, where he's been since January. He'd previously led Project Maven, an artificial intelligence machine-learning pathfinder project under the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.