In some sense, it is with a heavy heart that I write my last permanent contributor blog post at the Duck. I’ve loved being with the Ducks these past years, and I’ve appreciated being able to write weird, often off the track from mainstream political science, blogs. If any of you have followed my work over the years, you will know that I sit at an often-uncomfortable division between scholarship and advocacy. I’ve been one of the leading voices on lethal autonomous weapon systems, both at home in academia, but also abroad at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the International Committee for the Red Cross, and advising various states’ governments and militaries. I’ve also been thinking very deeply over the last few years about how the rise, acceptance and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in both peacetime and wartime will change our lives. For these reasons, I’ve decided to leave academia “proper” and work in the private sector for one of the leading AI companies in the world. This decision means that I will no longer be able to blog as freely as I have in the past. As I leave, I’ve been asked to give a sort of “swan song” for the Duck and those who read my posts. Here is what I can say going forward for the discipline, as well as for our responsibilities as social scientists and human beings.
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