DoD unveils how it will keep AI in check with ethics principles

Scott Maucione
federalnewsnetwork.com
Originally posted 25 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

The principle areas are based on recommendations from a 15-month study by the Defense Innovation Board — a panel of science and technology experts from industry and academia.

The principles are as follows:

1. Responsible: DoD personnel will exercise appropriate levels of judgment and care, while remaining responsible for the development, deployment, and use of AI capabilities.
2. Equitable: The Department will take deliberate steps to minimize unintended bias in AI capabilities.
3. Traceable: The Department’s AI capabilities will be developed and deployed such that relevant personnel possess an appropriate understanding of the technology, development processes, and operational methods applicable to AI capabilities, including with transparent and auditable methodologies, data sources, and design procedure and documentation.
4. Reliable: The Department’s AI capabilities will have explicit, well-defined uses, and the safety, security, and effectiveness of such capabilities will be subject to testing and assurance within those defined uses across their entire life-cycles.
5. Governable: The Department will design and engineer AI capabilities to fulfill their intended functions while possessing the ability to detect and avoid unintended consequences, and the ability to disengage or deactivate deployed systems that demonstrate unintended behavior.

The article is here.

AI Principles: Recommendations on the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence by the Department of Defense

Department of Defense
Defense Innovation Board
Published November 2019

Here is an excerpt:

What DoD is Doing to Establish an Ethical AI Culture

DoD’s “enduring mission is to provide combat-credible military forces needed to deter war and protect the security of our nation.” As such, DoD seeks to responsibly integrate and leverage AI across all domains and mission areas, as well as business administration, cybersecurity, decision support, personnel, maintenance and supply, logistics, healthcare, and humanitarian programs. Notably, many AI use cases are non-lethal in nature. From making battery fuel cells more efficient to predicting kidney disease in our veterans to managing fraud in supply chain management, AI has myriad applications throughout the Department.

DoD is mission-oriented, and to complete its mission, it requires access to cutting edge technologies to support its warfighters at home and abroad. These technologies, however, are only one component to fulfilling its mission. To ensure the safety of its personnel, to comply with the Law of War, and to maintain an exquisite professional force, DoD maintains and abides by myriad processes, procedures, rules, and laws to guide its work.  These are buttressed by DoD’s strong commitment to the following values: leadership, professionalism, and technical knowledge through the dedication to duty, integrity, ethics, honor, courage, and loyalty. As DoD utilizes AI in its mission, these values ground, inform,
and sustain the AI Ethics Principles.

As DoD continues to comply with existing policies, processes, and procedures, as well as to
create new opportunities for responsible research and innovation in AI, there are several
cases where DoD is beginning to or already engaging in activities that comport with the
calls from the DoD AI Strategy and the AI Ethics Principles enumerated here.

The document is here.

Pentagon seeks 'ethicist' to oversee military artificial intelligence

David Smith
The Guardian
Originally posted September 7, 2019

Wanted: military “ethicist”. Skills: data crunching, machine learning, killer robots. 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.”

Shanahan added: “So we are going to bring in someone who will have a deep background in ethics and then, with the lawyers within the department, we’ll be looking at how do we actually bake this into the future of the Department of Defense.”

The JAIC is a year old and has 60 employees. Its budget last year was $93m; this year’s request was $268m. Its focus comes amid fears that China has gained an early advantage in the global race to explore AI’s military potential, including for command and control and autonomous weapons.

The info is here.

The Bush Torture Scandal Isn’t Over

Daniel Engber
Slate.com
Originally published September 5, 2017

In June, a little-known academic journal called Teaching of Psychology published an article about the American Psychological Association’s role in the U.S. government’s war on terror and the interrogation of military detainees. Mitchell Handelsman’s seven-page paper, called “A Teachable Ethics Scandal,” suggested that the seemingly cozy relationship between APA officials and the Department of Defense might be used to illustrate numerous psychological concepts for students including obedience, groupthink, terror management theory, group influence, and motivation.

By mid-July, Teaching of Psychology had taken steps to retract the paper. The thinking that went into that decision reveals a disturbing under-covered coda to a scandal that, for a time, was front-page news. In July 2015, then–APA President Nadine Kaslow apologized for the organization’s involvement in Bush-era enhanced interrogations. “This bleak chapter in our history,” she said, speaking for a group with more than 100,000 members and a nine-figure budget, “occurred over a period of years and will not be resolved in a matter of months.” Two years later, the APA’s attempt to turn the page has devolved into a vicious internecine battle in which former association presidents have taken aim at one another. At issue is the question of who (if anyone) should be blamed for giving the Bush administration what’s been called a “green light” to torture detainees—and when the APA will ever truly get past this scandal.

The article is here.

A Teachable Ethics Scandal

Mitchell Handelsman
Teaching of Psychology

Abstract

In this article, I describe a recent scandal involving collusion between officials at the American Psychological Association (APA) and the U.S. Department of Defense, which appears to have enabled the torture of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The scandal is a relevant, complex, and engaging case that teachers can use in a variety of courses. Details of the scandal exemplify a number of psychological concepts, including obedience, groupthink, terror management theory, group influence, and motivation. The scandal can help students understand several factors that make ethical decision-making difficult, including stress, emotions, and cognitive factors such as loss aversion, anchoring, framing, and ethical fading. I conclude by exploring some parallels between the current torture scandal and the development of APA’s ethics guidelines regarding the use of deception in research.

The article is here.

Pentagon Wants Psychologists to End Ban on Interrogation Role

By James Risen
The New York Times
Originally posted on January 24, 2016

The Pentagon has asked the American Psychological Association to reconsider its ban on the involvement of psychologists in national security interrogations at the Guantánamo Bay prison and other facilities.

The Defense Department reduced its use of psychologists at Guantánamo in late 2015 in response to the policy approved by the association last summer.

But in a letter and accompanying memo to association officials this month, Brad Carson, the acting principal deputy secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, asked that the group, the nation’s largest professional organization for psychologists, revisit its “blanket prohibition.”

Although “the Department of Defense understands the desire of the American psychology profession to make a strong statement regarding reports about the role of former military psychologists more than a dozen years ago, the issue now is to apply the lessons learned to guide future conduct,” Mr. Carson wrote.

The article is here.

Advancing Medical Professionalism in US Military Detainee Treatment

Leonard S. Rubenstein, Scott A. Allen, Phyllis A. Guze
PLOS One
Published: January 5, 2016
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001930

Summary Points

• The United States Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) promulgated policies and requirements that required health professionals to participate in the mistreatment of counter-terrorism detainees through participation in such practices as abusive interrogation and force-feeding of detainees, in violation of ethical standards established by associations representing the health professions.

• A report of the Defense Health Board to the Secretary of Defense on military medical ethics released in 2015 found that the Department of Defense “does not have an enterprise-wide, formal, integrated infrastructure to systematically build, support, sustain, and promote an evolving ethical culture within the military health care environment.”

• The Board also found that ethical codes promulgated by the health professions, including the duty to avoid harm, provide a sound basis for military medical practice, even taking into account the unique challenges often faced by military health professionals in reconciling the military mission with patient needs.

• The health professional community should urge the Secretary of Defense to adopt and implement the recommendations of the Defense Health Board, rescind directives authorizing participation of health professionals in interrogation and force-feeding because they are inconsistent with professional ethics, and provide ongoing advice and support for the reform process.

The article is here.

Why Ethics Codes Fail

By Laura Stark
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published July 21, 2015

Last week, an independent investigation of the American Psychological Association found that several of its leaders aided the U.S. Department of Defense’s controversial enhanced interrogation program by loosing constraints on military psychologists. It was another bombshell in the ongoing saga of the U.S. war on terror in which psychologists have long served as foot soldiers. Now, it appears, psychologists were among its instigators, too.

Leaders of the APA used the profession’s ethics policy to promote unethical activity, rather than to curb it. How? Between 2000 and 2008, APA leaders changed their ethics policy to match the unethical activities that some psychologists wanted to carry out -- and thus make potential torture appear ethical. “The evidence supports the conclusion that APA officials colluded with DoD officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain APA ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key DoD officials wanted,” the investigation found, “and that were as closely aligned as possible with DoD policies, guidelines, practices or preferences, as articulated to APA by these DoD officials.” Among the main culprits was the APA’s own ethics director.

The entire article is here.

Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts Say Health Professionals Designed and Participated in Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment

Press Release
Institute of Medicine as a Profession


An independent panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts today charged that U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm. The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (see attached) concludes that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that U.S. military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody.

These practices included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report. Although the DoD has taken steps to address some of these practices in recent years, including instituting a committee to review medical ethics concerns at Guantanamo Bay Prison, the Task Force says the changed roles for health professionals and anemic ethical standards adopted within the military remain in place.

“The American public has a right to know that the covenant with its physicians to follow professional ethical expectations is firm regardless of where they serve,” said Task Force member Dr. Gerald Thomson, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Columbia University. “It’s clear that in the name of national security the military trumped that covenant, and physicians were transformed into agents of the military and performed acts that were contrary to medical ethics and practice. We have a responsibility to make sure this never happens again.”

The entire press release is here.

Thanks for Gary Schoener for this release.

Military says it's focusing on suicide prevention

By Mike Urban
The Reading Eagle
Originally published November 12, 2012


Fewer of America's troops are heading into combat with the war in Iraq over and the war in Afghanistan nearing a close.

But the demand for mental health care among active duty personnel is increasing, in part because combat has left many in need of help, and because the military is doing more to treat its mentally ill troops, Department of Defense officials said.

Suicide prevention has become one of the military's most urgent concerns, and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder within the military has come a long way in recent years, said Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith.

"We are committed to taking care of our people, and that includes doing everything possible to prevent suicides in the military," she said.

To reduce the long-standing military stigma surrounding mental health problems, the defense department urges commanders to support those in need of care, she said.

The entire story is here.

IOM: Military Needs Better Care for Addicts

By David Pittman
MedPage Today
Originally published September 17, 2012

The U.S. Defense Department needs more providers trained in treating substance abuse in the armed forces, according to an Institute of Medicine report.

The prevalence of comorbid behavioral conditions "necessitates access to providers with advanced levels of training rather than certified counselors or peer support by individuals in recovery," the report, released Monday, read.

The Department of Defense (DOD) asked the IOM to assess the way it handles the prevention, screening, diagnosis, and treatment of substance use disorders (SUDs) for service members, National Guard troops, members of the Reserves, and military dependents.

IOM researchers held public information gathering meetings, conducted five site visits to military bases to meet with primary care and behavioral health providers, and received information and data on services from the military.

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Specifically, the IOM found:

• Shortages of SUDs counselors across all branches
• Wide variation in training and credentialing requirements for counselors across the branches
• Outdated training manuals for Air Force and Navy substance abuse counselors
• A noticeable shortage of a workforce trained in SUD prevention including physicians trained in addiction medicine or psychiatry

The entire story is here.