Elke Schwarz (Reader, Political Theory, Queen Mary University of London) joins us for this second talk in a series of four from the “Intelligence” in the Absence of Life workshop held on April 9, 2024 at the University of Toronto. The workshop was organized and moderated by Teresa Heffernan, JHI’s 2023-24 Visiting Public Humanities Faculty Fellow.
Those who work in the artificial intelligence industry routinely speak of AI as human-like, but what does it mean to speak of creativity or intelligence or ethics in the absence of life? From the restructuring of labour to AI weapons systems to civil accountability, these talks open a conversation about what gets obscured in the AI hype cycle.
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Abstract: As the spectre of lethal AI-enabled weapons systems looms large on the current military horizon, the question of ethics becomes one of utmost urgency. How might one consider the ethics of AI weapons? A range of ethical approaches have been mobilized in solving this task, some of them drawing on the famous Trolley Problem to find answers, in which the human become little more than a (technologically enhanced) variable. This abstraction of the human is not accidental, but precisely the point. Abstraction decouples empathy from action. It also serves to render the ‘rational’ comprehensible only to mathematically savvy experts or analytic philosophers who provide the appropriate formular for action. I argue that contemporary approaches to military AI ethics have a longer history of abstracting the human from the concept of humanity in favour of reading human life in purely functional terms, so as to render it suitable for cybernetic frames. This longer history of evacuating the human from the moral equation of violent technologies, I argue, stems from a confluence of cybernetic reasoning and nuclear violence in the 1940s and 1950s and has at its core a game-theoretic mode of rationale that has come to underwrite much of today’s reasoning about AI-enabled warfare.
Elke Schwarz is a Reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (2018) and a 2024 Leverhulme research fellow, and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. Her research focuses on the intersection of the ethics of war and the ethics of technology with an emphasis on unmanned and autonomous/intelligent military technologies and their impact on the politics of contemporary warfare.
1 май 2024
