Certainty and algorithmic accountability in the decision to go to war: Lessons from evidentiary approaches in international criminal law

In Western democracies, the decision to go to war is made in ways that ensure decision-makers can be held accountable. In particular, bureaucracies rely on the production of a range of documents, such as records of meetings, to ensure accountability. Inserting AI into the decision-making process means finding ways to make sure that AI can also be held accountable for decisions to resort to force. But problems of accountability arise in this context because AI does not produce the type of documents associated with bureaucratic accountability. It is this gap in documentary capacity that is at the core of the troubling search for accountable AI in the context of the decision to go to war. This paper argues that the search for accountable AI is essentially an attempt to solve problems of epistemic uncertainty via documentation.

The paper argues that accountability can be achieved in other ways. It adopts the example of new forms of evidence in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) to show that epistemic uncertainty can be resolved and accountability apportioned without absolute epistemic certainty and without documentation in the sense commonly associated with accountability in a bureaucratic context.

Speaker
Sarah Logan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. Her research interests include the future of open source intelligence; the governance of international data transfers; the development of global privacy norms; and the geopolitics of global technology standards. Her work has been funded by the Annenberg School for Communication, the Australian Government, and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific/Association of Pacific Rim Universities.

Chair
Toni Erskine is Professor of International Politics in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU). She is recipient of the International Studies Association's 2024-25 Distinguished Scholar Award in International Ethics, Associate Fellow of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University, and Chief Investigator of the 'Anticipating the Future of War: AI, Automated Systems, and Resort-to-Force Decision Making' Research Project, funded by the Australian Government through a grant by Defence. 

This seminar series is part of a research project on Anticipating the Future of War: AI, Automated Systems, and Resort-to-Force Decision Making, generously funded by the Australian Department of Defence and led by Professor Toni Erskine from the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.

Additional information
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