US military researchers will brief industry later this month on an upcoming project to explore the ethics and technical challenges of using artificial intelligence and machine autonomy in future military operations.
Officials of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will brief industry on the Autonomy Standards and Ideals with Military Operational Values (ASIMOV) project on 29 January in Arlington.
The ASIMOV programme aims to develop benchmarks to measure the ethical difficulty of future military machine autonomy, and the readiness of autonomous systems to perform in military operations.
The rapid development of machine autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies needs ways to measure and evaluate the technical and ethical performance of autonomous systems.
ASIMOV will develop and demonstrate autonomy benchmarks, and is not developing autonomous systems or algorithms for autonomous systems.
The programme intends to create the ethical autonomy language to enable the test community to evaluate the ethical difficulty of specific military scenarios and the ability of autonomous systems to perform ethically within those scenarios.
ASIMOV performers will need to develop prototype modelling environments to explore military scenarios for machine automation and its ethical difficulties.
If successful, ASIMOV will build some of the standards against which future autonomous systems may be judged.
The goals of the ASIMOV Proposers Day are to introduce industry, academia, and government to the ASIMOV programme vision and goals; explain the mechanics of a DARPA programme and its milestones; and encourage teaming among potential bidders.
Those attending the ASIMOV proposers day briefings will give 60-second “lightning talks” that outline their teaming interests and capabilities; and have one-on-one sessions with the ASIMOV programme manager.
Those interested in attending the ASIMOV proposers day briefings should register online.