Artificial Intelligence: Risks for Africa's Security Sector

Postée le 31/05/2025

Presented by:

Dr. Lauren Sanders
Senior Research Fellow with the TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland

Mr. Kabir Adamu
Managing Director, Beacon Consulting

Objectives:
• Outline a typology of AI risks for security sector actors stemming from issues such as bias, autonomy, poorly trained data, and potential violations of international humanitarian law.
• Discuss how these risks may affect the employment of AI systems in conflict across Africa.

As with any new and rapidly advancing technology, its use in the security domain is not without risk. As AI systems have become more sophisticated, scholars, technologists and policymakers have grown concerned about the implications of increasingly autonomous weapons systems that lack effective human control or oversight. At a more technical level, data quality issues, brittleness in the face of new circumstances, hallucinations whereby AI systems observe nonexistent outputs, and a lack of understandable reasoning raise the possibility that AI systems used for military purposes may be inaccurate, flawed, or produce unintended consequences. There are ongoing debates about to what extent AI’s use in the military and security domain risk noncompliance with the laws of armed conflict.

This session addresses the practical, legal and ethical risks security sectors actors face. The session defines what some of these risks are, map out areas of debate and uncertainty, and identifies practices and principles to mitigate risks stemming from the use of artificial intelligence. It contextualizes how some of these risks have manifested in Africa, focusing on Nigeria’s employment of drones and other increasingly autonomous weapons systems.

Click here for the Program webpage, with recommended readings and panelist biographies:
https://africacenter.org/programs/ai-strategy/

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