Protecting open, democratic societies is our duty and collective responsibility. This increasingly requires the development of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to deter and defend. As democracies, we believe that we have a special responsibility to carefully consider the development and deployment of these technologies. At HOPE, we take this responsibility seriously.

HOPE was founded to put ethics at the heart of the development of defense technology. We strive to consider ethical issues and considerations beforehand, and we believe that our work puts us in a unique position to contribute to the public debate and international guidelines in this area.

We place particular emphasis on defining the democracies with which we work together. To this end, we have created quantitative and qualitative guidelines to help us think about potential customer countries. Often, decisions are simple. Sometimes, they may need more context and information. In any case, our internal ethical processes must be transparent, standardized and accountable, both at that time and in the past. The development of the technology itself is the second major area of focus. For example, while the topic of “human-in-loop” is well established, we found that a human's effectiveness in investigating AI depends heavily on a number of factors, including: cognitive load, perceived AI reliability, fatigue, and UX design. For us, these are not theoretical considerations; we need to address these problems on a daily basis and come up with solutions.

If we — as open societies — care about ethics, we cannot leave the development of advanced defense technologies to third parties. Instead, we need to give sovereign democracies control over the ethical decisions and considerations that come with them, and we need to make the underlying technology understandable, transparent, and auditable.

We are proud that almost every job interview with candidates raises the ethical issue, and we encourage critical thinking and questioning among all prospective and existing employees. Regular ethics workshops help us strengthen our ethical strength and gain experience in assessing specific cases and calibrating the considerations that may be involved. In all of this, we try to lead the way and think about potentially complex issues before they occur.