Abstract
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to help policy makers and military officers navigate the battlefield in Gaza and Ukraine has often made headlines in the past months. Rather than fully autonomous applications of AI, the technologies are reported to be used to quickly perceive, evaluate, and act upon battlefield information. Among scholars of security and strategic studies, the use of AI in the military domain has raised many questions on the ethical, legal, political, tactical and strategic implications of this development. Pivotal to this debate is the question if and to what extent decision-making can be outsourced to machines and which tasks require human expertise. However, what human expertise is and how this notion of expertise changed over time since the early uses of computer models for military purposes is not well studied. This paper therefore investigates how the relation between humans and machines in the production of expert knowledge has transformed. More specifically, it will adopt a historical approach to analyse how early computational programs, developed for a military purpose, balanced mechanically processed data with human judgment to create expert knowledge.
Panel: Knowledge Production on War