Rear Adm. David Hahn: Military Needs to Establish Trust as AI Tools Mature

Rear Adm. David Hahn, chief of naval research, told C4ISRNET in an interview published Tuesday that military needs to “get at a place of trust” as algorithms and other artificial intelligence tools get more sophisticated and transition into the operational space.

“[We need trust] between the algorithm, what’s behind that curtain, and our ability as the humans to agree that the decision or the space that it’s going to operate in – the context in which its making that decision – is understood by us,” Hahn said.

“That doesn’t mean it’s an unsupervised act; it means we understand it well enough to trust it.”

He noted about the potential implications of developments in the field of cybersecurity for AI, especially in advancing the “human-machine teaming environment,” and the challenge the military faces when it comes to using AI in an operational capacity.

“Our challenge will be whether we have harnessed our own data and done it in a way where we can make the connections between relevant data sets to optimize the mission effect we could get by applying those tools available to everybody,” Hahn said.