The Alliance Has No Common Answer To A Machine-Speed Question

Abstract

NATO has spent three years building the technical scaffolding to field autonomous systems across its member states, and has largely succeeded at interoperability, defined as an engineering property: allied machines can operate as one. It has not resolved a harder property of authority. When an autonomous system proposes a lethal action faster than a human can meaningfully review it, and two allies operating the same kill chain hold different national thresholds for permitting that action, whose threshold governs, and who is accountable when they disagree?