Some students, faculty remain uneasy about CMU's Army AI Task Force; The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 18, 2019

Courtney Linder, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Some students, faculty remain uneasy about CMU's Army AI Task Force

"Earlier this month, the Artificial Intelligence Task Force was introduced at the National Robotics Engineering Center. It’s meant as a hub for universities and private-industry partners to conduct research on AI in military applications.

While those on campus recognize CMU’s storied history with the U.S. Department of Defense — including contracting with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on a regular basis and the hundreds of millions of defense dollars flowing into the university’s Software Engineering Institute — critics say they wish they had more information on this new work with the Army.

“We’re concerned that [the university] didn’t ask for any campus input or announce it,” said Wilson Ekern, a sophomore studying technical writing and German. “There’s a pretty big effort to get engineering and computer science students plugged into this military industrial complex.”

 His sentiments come at a time when Silicon Valley and the tech industry, at large, are toeing a gray line between creating useful innovations for defense and civilian protection and producing autonomous weapons with the potential to kill."