The Duck of Minerva

Praeger has published a new two-volume compendium on arms control edited by Robert Williams Jr. and Paul R.Viotti. If you're writing anything on the subject of arms, weapons advocacy or national security governance Volume 1, at least, is a pretty helpful resource - especially if you have research money to cover the hefty price tag.The book begins with some theory, history and definitions; some philosophical views and a section on "Arms Control and the Social Sciences" which includes chapters on human security as a paradigm, conflict resolution as an emerging discipline, and agent-based...

Last week, I embedded with smart people thinking hard about ethics, armed conflict and emerging technologies. I learned that it's an open questions whether governments can or should move toward fully autonomous systems; I learned philosophers, technicians and lawyers approach these questions so differently that it's probably wrong to think of a expert network like CETMONS-AWTG as an epistemic community. I also learned that being a world-famous expert on emerging lethal technologies doesn't guarantee that you will necessarily know what a Cylon is. [I didn't exactly have a Dwight Schrute...

 One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the human presence from battle-spaces altogether. The general consensus is that this is unlikely, with which I am not claiming to disagree. But what fascinated me was a particular argument to this effect: that lethal robots would never be able to replace human beings as sacrifices in the name of the nation. Two constitutive...

Regular blogging will begin to resume over the next weeks now that I'm back from a family road trip down the eastern seaboard and starting to gear up for the academic year. In the meantime, of possible interest to Duck readers is this terrific exhibit on The Art of Video Games at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, which we randomly stumbled into one day during a fire drill at the International Spy Museum across the street. Here is one of the video trailers of the exhibit: