The special issue seeks to critically interrogate and intervene in a core challenge of our times – the intensified and accelerated militarism of artificial intelligence (AI). Not only are militaries across the globe scrambling to adopt so-called AI to gain a military advantage over competitors, but in the West, winning the ‘AI arms race’ has become a strategic and moral imperative – a discourse that portrays AI as inevitable and furthers the myth of technological dominance as a path to security.
However, the question of AI, militarism, and security is not merely about the future of geopolitics. While belief in the promise of technoscience to make war and violence predictable has a long history, AI is today promoted as a tool capable of fulfilling the martial dream of automating systems that provide full battlespace situational awareness and understanding of the enemy. However, the celebration of AI as an epistemic authority, offering “ground truths” and imperatives for action to make warfare faster, rests on highly questionable assumptions.
So-called ‘civilian’ uses of AI to surveil, govern, and control populations not only inherit the assumption of militarism, but also its antagonistic logics of sorting people into categories of us and them, wanted and unwanted. In all these cases, military, intelligence, and security agencies increasingly rely on an expanding infrastructure of data services operated by a small number of ‘Big Tech’ companies. As these companies are now effectively capturing entire national security ecosystems this raises new and profound questions about accountability, sovereignty, and the preservation of democratic values.
Against this background, the special issue aims to advance the ongoing sociotechnical research agenda on AI militarism, opening new paths for understanding how AI moves between spaces of war, security, and technology. We are especially interested in receiving contributions that focus on the three main themes of the issue: AI and the epistemics of warfare; AI between warfare and the homeland; and the political economy of military AI.
For further information on suggested topics as well as submission deadlines and instructions, click here.
