Governing Autonomies: Imagining Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the ‘Future Combat Air System’ European Armament Project

The chapter addresses the rise of responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) as a mode of governing autonomous weapon systems (AWS). The focus of the chapter is on the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), Europe’s most ambitious armament project that is envisioned to become the core of the European air forces from around 2040. The first section will give an overview of the FCAS project. The second section offers a description of how the project imagines AI as the means to enhance human decision making and to enable responsibility and accountability. The third section will point out the liberal anthropology underlying this ideal and will then show how neoliberal forms of government are brought into play in order to realise this ideal: namely individual responsibilization of operators and environmental management of behaviour through ethics by design. The fourth section will analyse the shortcomings of this approach by means of the so-called FCAS Ethical AI Demonstrator.