Uso bellico dell’intelligenza artificiale e principi dell’umanità [The Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and the Principles of Humanity]

The growing use of artificial intelligence in armed conflict raises problems that the existing rules of ius in bello do not specifically address. In such circumstances, the Martens Clause makes clear that belligerents do not operate within a legal vacuum, but remain subject to the general principles derivable from customary international law, the dictates of public conscience, and the principles of humanity. The latter embody the ethical considerations that inform the normative architecture of international humanitarian law, and thus constitute its underlying axiological foundation. Central among them is the requirement that decisions bearing upon human life remain linked to human judgment and moral responsibility. AI-powered weaponsystems capable of autonomously selecting and engaging targets must be regarded as fundamentally at odds with this standard, insofar as they dissolve the nexus between life-and-death decisions and human moral agency. Comparable concerns may, however, also arise in relation to AI-based decision-support systems, wherever automation bias, algorithmic opacity, and operational time pressure erode the conditions for meaningful human assessment, reducing human intervention to little more than a formal endorsement of machine-generated outputs.