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Uncle Sam has set up his recruiting machinery. However, these are not marines to fight in Afghanistan or fighter pilots to patrol the Russian border. What the US Army is now looking for is an ethics expert to help you discern how far your combat robots should go .

This is a highly specialized profile demanded by the Joint Center for Artificial Intelligence, which the Department of Defense launched last year.

"This is a position for someone who is not only aware of the technique, but who is an ethicist, " said Air Force Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan. "We are looking for someone who has a deep ethics background, and then the lawyers will see how we incorporate it into the Department of Defense."

The Department of Artificial Intelligence of the United States Army is still in an incipient phase. Founded a year ago, it only has a budget of 268 million dollars 60 people. Its objectives, according to Shanahan, are "to accelerate the adoption and integration of artificial intelligence by the Department of Defense to have an impact on large-scale missions."

However, from the US Army they are still aware that it will take a long time until these robots managed by Artificial Intelligence are fully incorporated into their military deployments .

Areas of use

"We still have a long way to go to take these pilots, prototypes and ideas through the valley of the death of technology but we want to deploy the capabilities of artificial intelligence at high speed and scale, " says Shanahan.

Among the public projects in which the army works is a predictive maintenance of the SH-60 Seahawk helicopters, artificial intelligence applied to humanitarian assistance projects to combat natural disasters, intelligence operations and project automation in the field of business.

In the next 2020, the US military plans to put this technology into practice in fire fighting and military maneuvering. "We will focus the effort on different facets of war combat operations with areas such as the fusion of intelligence in operations, the establishment of joint command and control centers, accelerated firing sensors , autonomous swarm systems , objective development and to improve workflows in the operations center. "

Fear of China

Fear of China is one of the main motivations of the US army for the development of Artificial Intelligence applied to combat. According to a statement, the United States Army is "aware that their potential adversaries do not share their same ethical values in areas such as the collection and use of information and artificial intelligence systems are as intelligent as the data they have. access".

The United States also accuses China and Russia of not being subject to the same restrictions in the field of data collection.

" The lower restrictions they have on privacy and civil liberties give them some advantages to get data faster and then develop capabilities faster as a result of what they have available in the data," he said.

Still, he added, it is not an inevitable conclusion that this is benefiting the Chinese or Russian military .

A surprising statement considering the numerous scandals in which the US administration and its intelligence agencies have been involved over the past decade, and with the NSA in the spotlight, thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange, among others.

However, the "ethical military" that Uncle Sam is looking for would also have to do some work related to the field of intelligence. " It is very important for us to get to know the facts about what China and Russia are doing in the military in this field."

The United States also recognizes that China has a potential advantage in the development of Artificial Intelligence. "It is directed from the top down by the Government and Industry to promote national interests," they say. " Something that does not happen in the United States ," they lament.

A weakness that Shanahan seeks to compensate "by strengthening ties between the Government , industry and the United States academy in order to move forward as fast as China."

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