American military personnel in San Diego on the borders of the United States and Mexico.Credit: Carlos Moreno/Norfuto/Gett
What are the effects of allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to make critical decisions about life and death in fighting? This is a question that Nicholas Evans, a social scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, was hoping that his research could be able to answer – until the financing was cut by the US Defense Ministry (DOD) this month.
Grants were among the 91 studies of social science science that ended by the Ministry of Defense, including many of them were part of the leading Minirva Research Initiative, which supports basic social science research to better understand the emerging threats of national security.
“One of the wonderful parts” in Mineeva is that it requires “the idea of security on a large scale,” says Leonardo Villalon, a political scientist studying the coast region in Africa at the University of Florida, Ginsville. Mineeva says research on global dynamics such as violence, instability, natural disasters, human displacement and immigration.
The Ministry of Defense stated in a press statement that it “hides the social science research portfolio as part of a broader effort to ensure financial responsibility and give priority to important activities.” The termination notifications, which are seen natureHe stated that grants no longer serve “the goals of the program or the agency’s priorities.”
“The big challenge” is that there is almost no place in the United States where you can get two and a half million dollars to conduct social science research, and this limits our ability to obtain funding. “
National interest
The Minereva initiative was launched in 2008, and grants are managed by the search offices run by the army, the Air Force and the Navy. Part of the money goes to teaching students in American military schools and academies in the main areas of social sciences, and many of these scholarships have been terminated.
Neil Johnson, a physicist at the University of George Washington in Washington, DC, received notifications of termination, each with a value of about $ 2.5 million. One of them, close to the end of his term for five years, has supported research on how threats, hatred and extremism via social networks via the Internet and not connected to the Internet. The other focused on security threats along the national border.
“The logical basis was really strange,” says Johnson. For years, he participated in calls and outputs in DOD agencies. Among other things, intelligence officers in the military bases for its research results advised, from the Health Corps to armed violence. Now that everything has stopped, he says.
Cathy Pelis, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that spending money on military readiness-on weapons and technology, for example-but not to understand the nature and causes of possible military conflicts is incredibly short-looking. “It is a kind of mind filling,” she says. The Mineva Research initiative is a small part of the DOD budget. In the 2024 budget request, the administration requested $ 64.3 million for Mineva out of a total budget of $ 842 billion.
Pelis has also been completed by Mineeva grant. It was granted in 2023, enabling it to study the effects of climate shocks on food security in sub -Saharan Africa. He was initially guaranteed for three years, with two other option. Between Mineeva’s losses and grants in grants from the United States Agency for International Development, Pelis has lost about $ 5 million in the past few weeks. Since then, it has been stretched for money to pay salaries and reach ways to share the limited data that she and her team were able to collect. “They wereted a full pile of money that was spent on research that could no longer be fulfilled,” she says.
Villalon, who was studying the impact of climate risk on societies in the coast, and how those societies that were responding to changes had already spent more than $ 1.6 million were granted as a three -year grant in 2022. He and his team remained only about $ 200,000, which would have been used to support data analysis and exposure to it.