Artificial intelligence isn’t just being used to wage war, it’s also being used to try and end it, and to find the people caught in the middle.
While militaries around the world are deploying AI on the battlefield, organizations such as the Red Cross and peace-focused tech companies are using the same tools to try to protect civilians, reunite families and help broker ceasefires.
Laura Walker McDonald, technologist with the Red Cross, said the organization uses AI to identify targets, the same way some militaries do. But in the Red Cross’s case, those “targets” are people who need help.
“So we can understand where people might need assistance or where people are even,” Walker McDonald said.
The Red Cross also uses drone technology. Walker McDonald pointed to a major earthquake in Nepal years ago, when damaged roads made it nearly impossible to reach remote villages.
“You could fly a drone out there, and it would be able to send back imagery and tell you what had happened so you could get help to people,” she said.
But drones used in conflict zones can backfire for aid agencies such as the Red Cross, since the sound alone can trigger fear in people who’ve recently been attacked.
“When you hear it, you think, ‘I have to hide, because I don’t know what’s going to happen,'” Walker McDonald said. “Whether they’re looking for people and will come back, or whether the drone itself is armed makes you feel stressed.”
Because of that, Walker McDonald said the Red Cross won’t deploy drones anywhere the noise itself causes harm.
The Red Cross has also turned to AI to dig through a century’s worth of records on missing persons — files that are damaged, faded or simply hard to read.
“We have archives of information about people who have been missing in war, who’ve been seeking their families, or whose families have been seeking them,” Walker McDonald said. “They go back 100 years. We’ve been able to train an AI to start looking at those records and actually digitizing the information much faster.”
On the peace-building side, Frank Aum, a peace strategist with the AI company Transcend, said AI can compress the timeline for conflict analysis from months down to moments, which can be a big help for private companies working in areas where conflict and tensions have raged on for decades, as well as the United Nations, which seeks to resolve such disputes.
“We have built agents and a platform that can do the type of analysis that humans would do in the period of days, weeks, months, which AI can do very quickly,” Aum said.
Transcend, founded by Ola Mohajer, focuses on de-escalation.
“What we want to do now is automate a lot of that analytical layer of the work,” she said. “So that we can do the important things like building trust, addressing political will.”
She said examples of how that information could help the private sector could involve a mining company working in Africa, where there’s lots of documented tensions.
“What you’re likely to find there are things like black market rates for critical minerals, child workers, unsafe working conditions, forced labor,” she said. “Companies absolutely do not want this. They don’t want it anywhere in their supply chain, and so, what companies pay attention to is making sure that, A, it’s not in there in the first place, but B, if it does get in there, make sure it’s quiet and taken care of.”
Mohajer said the technology could also help figure out solutions to the root of those problems.
Aum said automating the analytical work so human experts can focus on the harder parts — building trust and political will — will save senior decision makers and experts time.
“Helping governments, nongovernmental organizations make peace and the resolution of conflict faster,” Aum said.