March 1st, Voices from the Field speaker spotlight interview. Dr. Danks

Kinetic warfare involves tanks, bullets, and other hardware, but everyone recognizes that understandings of it must involve the warfighters from general staff to boots on the ground. In contrast, most discussions of cyberwarfare—its strategy, impacts, ethics—focus on the machines, systems, and data, while largely ignoring the human element. Human agents are included only as collateral effects (e.g., the impact on humans of shutting down an adversary’s electrical grid), or as a locus of moral responsibility (e.g., providing the ground for the moral justification of a cyber-attack). In this talk, I explore a range of conceptual, psycholinguistic, and cultural issues that arise when we focus on the cognitive constraints, biases, and heuristics of human agents in four different roles: developers of a cyber-action (whether attack or exploit); target of that cyber-action; defender against some cyber action; and third party observers, whether neutral nations, or even the public within a nation engaged in cyber-actions. Cyberwarfare is conducted with machines, often autonomous, but humans are the developers, targets, and defenders of cyber-actions. Thus, a full understanding of the psycholinguistic, social, and cultural distinctions of cyberwarfare must incorporate the human actors with all of their cognitive, conceptual, and cultural biases, tendencies, and foibles.

Joseph Danks is Research Professor Emeritus and formerly Technical Director for Strategic Intelligence Analysis at the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). His research has focused on how people comprehend sentences and text, especially across languages, the cognitive processes involved in translation, and how elderly patients communicate their life-sustaining treatment preferences.