Contesting Paul Scharre’s influential vision of “centaur warfighting” and the idea that autonomous weapon systems will replace human warfighters, Sparrow and Henschke propose that the manned-unmanned teams of the future are more likely to be minotaurs—teams of humans under the control, supervision, or command of artificial intelligence. They examine the likely composition of the future force and prompt a necessary conversation about the ethical issues raised by minotaur warfighting.

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Keywords: manned-unmanned teaming, centaur warfighting, autonomous weapon systems, future force, ethics
Episode Transcript: "Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming"
Stephanie Crider (Host)

You're listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today I'm chatting with Rob Sparrow, professor in the philosophy program and an associate investigator in the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society at Monash University, and Adam Henschke, an assistant professor in the philosophy section at the University of Twente, Netherlands.

Sparrow and Henske are the authors of “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming,” which ran in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome to Decisive Point, gentlemen. Set the stage for us, please, including Paul Sharre's perspective.

Robert J. Sparrow

We've seen drones and teleoperated weapon systems play an increasing role in contemporary conflict. There is lots of enthusiasm for autonomy in weapon systems in the military, as I think 20 years ago, there was a paper in Parameters arguing that in the future the tempo of battle would increase to such a point that only computers would be capable of making the decisions that are required to win battles. So for a long time, there's been a debate about the relationship between human beings and unmanned systems in warfighting. Recently, Paul Sharre has argued that we don't need to worry about autonomous weapon systems taking over all the combat roles because, actually, the future of warfighting involves manned-unmanned teaming, and Sharre suggests that we should think of this on the model of what he described as a Centaur. A centaur is a mythical creature with the head and upper body of a human being and the lower body of a horse. And that's a really nice image. You've got the human being in command and in control and the machines doing the physical work involved in warfighting.

We think that's perhaps optimistic for a number of reasons, and that what we've seen, is really in applications, is it's often easier to get machines to be making decisions than it is to get machines to do physical work. And so, for that reason, we think that the future of manned-unmanned teaming might be better imagined as what we call a minotaur. And so, rather than the human being in charge of the team, we suspect that in many roles, actually, the AI will be in charge of the team. And the human beings will be effectively under the command of the AI and doing the physical work, where the mental work will be performed by artificial intelligence.

Henschke

One way to think of Paul Sharre's approach is, as Rob said, he's advocated this view of centaur warfighting, and there the human is generally seen as the head, the decision-making part of the warfighting operation. And the robots and the machines, they do the, kind of, the grunt work. They're the things that do the stuff on the ground. So, the way in which this manned-unmanned kind of vision is put forward in Sharre’s work is humans do the deciding and the robots, or the machines, do the fighting

Host