Eyebrows have been raised, to put it mildly, at the news that the Ministry of Defence is using an artificial intelligence programme to assess submissions to the current review of Britain’s armed forces. The Strategic Defence Review was launched in July, and the following month a call for evidence was issued, inviting ‘serving military, veterans, MPs of all parties, industry, and academia’ to submit responses to a series of propositions through an online portal. The closing date was 30 September, and the responses would ‘help’ the review team led by former Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen.
Defence is a policy area rich in verbiage and jargon, and both military and civilian experts are adept at shrouding even simple meaning in the most impenetrable of language
It transpires that the government agreed a contract over the summer with US data analytics software company Palantir Technologies to design a programme which will analyse the thousands of submissions received, looking for key words and themes.
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