Lay Attribution of Agency and Responsibility to AI and Remotely Piloted Drones in Military Context: Vignette Experiment in Russia

Abstract

The paper introduces a comprehensive vignette design that explores the attribution of responsibility and agency in military contexts, explicitly focusing on the interaction between two sovereign countries, the type of military operation, and the type of actor involved. The study gathered data from 1103 participants through an online survey. The results reveal several significant conclusions. Participants tend to attribute higher levels of agency to actors engaged in non-military operations than military-related ones. Human actors receive the highest ratings in terms of both responsibility and agency. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with artificial intelligence are attributed more agency and responsibility than remotely piloted drones. Participants tend to attribute higher levels of agency to the side of the conflict associated with their own state. We found that trust, positive attitudes towards UAVs, and the tendency to anthropomorphize them positively correlated with agency and responsibility attribution. These findings provide valuable insights into the evolving perception of modern warfare, where the integration of human combatants, conventional warfare, and advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence-driven autonomous algorithms, is becoming increasingly prominent.

Keywords

• lay expertise
• studies of science and technology
• human-ai interaction (haii)
• factorial experiment
• unmanned aerial vehicles (uav)
• war studies
• actor-network theory