“Mission Impossible”? Talking Popular Culture at the REAIM 2024 Summit
The simultaneous release of the films Barbie and Oppenheimer on 21 July 2023 was a cultural phenomenon. “Barbenheimer”—as this event was popularly called—captured global attention. It also invited reflection on how the public comes to think about the politics of nuclear weapons and what role pop culture plays in this process. Released a week prior […]
The Creator of New Thinking On AI? Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Why Stories About Intelligent Machines Matter
Whilst the depiction of weaponised artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in popular culture is often highly inaccurate and dramatized, Hollywood blockbusters provide the starting point from which many members of the public begin to develop their thinking about these technologies. For instance, news articles discussing AI are often accompanied with images of metallic silver skulls with […]
A Question of Trust? New US Initiatives to Tackle the Human Control Problem
A lack of or a substantially diminished quality of human control is often understood as the major problem associated with military AI. The US Department of Defense (DoD) ‘Directive 3000.09’ that was released in 2012 as one of the first political documents on autonomy in weapon systems, for example, states in its updated version from […]
Can Track II Dialogues be the New “Ping-Pong” Diplomacy to Thaw the Sino-US Relationship on Military AI?
China and the US find themselves increasingly enmeshed in a deteriorating relationship as the two countries contest for primacy across many fields. Both Beijing and Washington view technological leadership, especially an edge in artificial intelligence (AI), as vital to gaining an upper-hand in this intensified power contest. As the two rivals scale up investment in […]
Shortening the Kill Chain with Artificial Intelligence
This post has been guest written by Jennifer Rooke. Jennifer’s author information has been included at the end of this post. In a speech at the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyberspace Conference held on 20 September 2021, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall stated (at 20:50 in the embedded video) […]
Drones in Afghanistan: Not a Technological “Silver Bullet”
[A shorter version of this piece was published in the German-language ct Magazin für Computertechnik in September 2021, Ingvild Bode & Tom Watts] The United States and its NATO partners have ignominiously withdrawn from Afghanistan. One of this war’s many legacies will be the use of remotely piloted aircraft – colloquially referred to as drones – to conduct air […]
“I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots and Your Terminator Tropes”: A Primer on the Terminator Franchise
“Listen, and understand. That Terminator is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop…EVER, until you are dead!”, Kyle Reese. References to the Terminator are an ubiquitous feature of debates on Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS). Paul Scharre […]
The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the US Policy on AWS
This short contribution addresses the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) report recently published in the United States (US). This report marks an important step in defining the US’ future AI security policy and can be expected to influence the US position on questions relating to the regulation and prohibition of militarised AI. It […]
