Talk AbstractIn the context of unprecedented
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
budgets, this talk examines the recent history of DoD funding for
academic research in algorithmically based warfighting. I draw from a
corpus of DoD grant solicitations from 2007 to 2023, focusing on those
addressed to researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
Considering the implications of DoD funding for academic research, the
talk proceeds through three analytic sections. In the first, I offer a
critical examination of the distinction between basic and applied
research, showing how funding calls framed as basic research nonetheless
enlist researchers in a war fighting agenda. In the second, I offer a
diachronic analysis of the corpus, showing how a ‘one small problem’
caveat, in which affirmation of progress in military technologies is
qualified by acknowledgement of outstanding problems, becomes
justification for additional investments in research. I close with an
analysis of DoD aspirations based on a subset of Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant solicitations for the use of AI
in battlefield applications. Taken together, I argue that grant
solicitations work as a vehicle for the mutual enlistment of DoD funding
agencies and the academic AI research community in setting research
agendas. The trope of basic research in this context offers shelter from
significant moral questions that military applications of one’s
research would raise, by obscuring the connections that implicate
researchers in U.S. militarism.
SpeakerDavid Gray Widder (he/him) studies how people creating “Artificial
Intelligence” systems think about the downstream harms their systems
make possible, and the wider cultural, political, and economic logics
which shape these thoughts. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, and earned his PhD from the School of Computer Science
at Carnegie Mellon University. He has previously conducted research at
Intel Labs, Microsoft Research, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
His recent research has been accepted to FAccT, Nature, CSCW, and Big Data & Society. His scholarly and activist work has appeared in Motherboard, Wired, the Associated Press, and the New York Times. David was born in Tillamook, Oregon, and raised in Berlin and Singapore. He maintains a conceptual-realist artistic practice, advocates against police terror and pervasive surveillance, and enjoys distance running. You can engage with him on Mastodon, Bluesky, or Twitter.