A Southeast Asian perspective on the impact of increasingly Autonomous systems on subnational relations of power

ABSTRACT

The emergence of increasingly autonomous uninhabited systems has sparked understandable concern among policymakers, defence personnel, and academics, as well as civil-society. Quite reasonably, the body of literature that is arising in response to this concern has largely remained focused on the ethical, legal and practical consequences of “killer robots” being deployed by great power militaries. Unfortunately, however, this has left significant gaps in our understanding of how the diffusion of uninhabited systems and Artificial Intelligence will impact on security of rising middle powers and the lives of their citizens. This article provides an analysis of how the diffusion of uninhabited systems will influence the exercise of sub-national power, using Southeast Asia as its focal point. In other words, this paper asks the question of how autonomous weapon systems will influence the regimes of power and considers how the blurring of the lines between the law enforcement and military use of force paradigms affects law enforcement, border security, and internal surveillance and repression in this region.

KEYWORDS:

• Lethal autonomous weapon systems
• military innovation
• civil–military relations
• use of force
• militarisation of law enforcement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Artificial Intelligence can be described as “the use of computing power, in the form of algorithms, to conduct tasks that previously required human intelligence” – (Horowitz 2019).

2. The author thanks anonymous reviewer one for raising this point.

3. This question is explored in-depth in a latter section.

4. For a detailed exploration of the implications of AI for authoritarian states more generally see (Feldstein 2019)LinkManagerBM_FN_AUTOOCI9fxxg.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Austin Wyatt

Dr Austin Wyatt is a Research Associate in the Values in Defence & Security Technology group at The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy.His research concerns autonomous weapons, with a particular emphasis on their disruptive effects in Southeast Asia.