The devil is in the details.
What if the AI decides that the course of action that leads to the desired outcome of winning the conflict is to kill civilians but it is also aware that outright killing civilians is against the law or will be ignored by the decision making human so it instead decides to recommend a series of strikes that indirectly lead to a large famine which results in the death of the civilians and winning the conflict?
Who is to blame there? Is this outcome desirable?
"To be actually a useful tool to military commanders, you want an AI which [...] gives them a reasoned opinion on which of the various options they are considering is most advisable."
With that (far more sophisticated) AI system, leadership could just de-prioritize options with excessive risk of civilian casualty.
So I don't see why a strategic military advice platform couldn't do the same basic thing.
[0] Here's a working example: http://beta.datalex.org/app/?rulebase=http://austlii.communi...
What if the AI lies?
What if the AI lies and civilians die because of it?
I always figured that was what happened in the film Colossus: The Forbin Project, the computer(s) found a way to ensure / prevent a nuclear war / peace, by taking control of the nuclear arsenals on their own and ensuring peace via their own threat of nuclear weapons.
Requires political victory. War is extension of politics, not alien invasion defense.
Thus, a planning AI that can handle tactical targeting task but can’t handle politics probably “can’t war” going by definitions.
1) A military commander programs an AI squadron with the parameters of destroying a heavily defended military target with the parameters of minimizing casualties.
2) The AI veers the bombers 180 degrees off course and attacks a nearby town, purposely and irreparably destroying the only hospitals and drinking water production facilities in the region. Thousands of civilians are killed, and the loss of fresh water will cause many more casualties in the following weeks as people are no longer able to get drinking water. No military targets are hit.
3) The AI is examined. The reason it attacked the town is unclear but it is determined that it was not a malfunction or sabotage.
Given that.... was a war crime actually committed?
The AI cannot commit a crime, it's not a person. The people that ordered the attack specified that it should be attacking a valid military target. The people that created the AI certainly didn't intentionally put any mechanism in there to have the AI purposely commit war crimes.
Given that, is it an actual crime? Or would it be closer to something like a natural disaster?
...to be clear I'm not a bright guy so I've probably missed something obvious...
https://gizmodo.com/for-20-years-the-nuclear-launch-code-at-...
I would expect the people who wrote the AI would impose on it constraints to avoid this – to be useful in the real world, an AI has to comply with the same constraints that real world military commanders have to follow, and the laws of war are among those (certainly if we are talking about the US military.)
(A realistic risk is that it might interpret those rules differently than a human would – maybe in an overly pedantic manner – and its overly pedantic readings of the rules might give human commanders cover or encouragement to engage in the same harmful pedantry.)
> or suggest nuking the enemy as a first strike
I doubt they'd even give an AI that option to consider. Realistically if you are a US military commander – in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or wherever the US might intervene next – that's not an option on the menu. The decision to use nuclear weapons only comes from the very top, and the very top will only consider it in utterly dire circumstances.
To be actually a useful tool to military commanders, you want an AI which suggests to them strategies they might not have thought of, or which gives them a reasoned opinion on which of the various options they are considering is most advisable. A useful AI tells them how to use the resources they have, and nuclear weapons are not–in normal circumstances–an available resource to US military operations.