Pentagon seeks 'ethicist' to oversee military artificial intelligence

Must have: cool head, moral compass and the will to say no to generals, scientists and even presidents. The Pentagon is looking for the right person to help it navigate the morally murky waters of artificial intelligence (AI), billed as the battlefield of the 21st century. "One of the positions we are going to fill will be someone who's not just looking at technical standards, but who's an ethicist," Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the US defense department, told reporters last week. "I think that's a very important point that we would not have thought about this a year ago, I'll be honest with you. In Maven [a pilot AI machine learning project], these questions really did not rise to the surface every day, because it was really still humans looking at object detection, classification and tracking. There were no weapons involved in that."