The Realities of Autonomous Weapons

Thomas Christian Bächle is Head of the Digital Society Research Programme at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin and researcher at the University of Bonn. His areas of research include human/ machine interaction, technological materialities, interfaces and agency; mobile media, surveillance, robotics, affective computing and simulation technologies.

Jascha Bareis is a political scientist and researcher at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and associate researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) in Berlin. He investigates political communication and power at the crossroads of technology governance, hype and BigTech. His work has been published in journals and blogs like Science, Technology & Human Values, Big Data & Society and Verfassungsblog.

Peter Behrbohm is a Berlin-based artist and architect exploring future conflicts and utopian societies through collaborative, site-specific and context-based research. He designs operational obstacles and fictitious institutions. Many of his works are surgically intervening public spaces, routines and discourses, often aiming at revealing the constructedness of realities and demonstrating the possibilities of other forms of coexistence.

Ingvild Bode is Associate Professor at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark. Her research focuses on processes of normative and policy change, especially with regard to the use of force. Her work has been published in the European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, International Studies Review and other journals. She is the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC)- funded project AutoNorms (2020– 2025), investigating how autonomous weapon systems change norms.

Christoph Ernst is a research assistant (tenured) at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Bonn. His main research interests are diagrammatic thinking and interface studies (especially cognition and tacit knowledge), future media and theory of sociotechnical imagination, aesthetics and theory of visual media (especially film and television), and media and the military (especially autonomous weapon systems). Among his publications are Diagramme zwischen Metapher und Explikation – Studien zur Medien- und Filmästhetik der Diagrammatik (transcript, 2021); Media Futures: An Introduction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Tech | Demo (edited with Julia Eckel and Jens Schröter, Universi, 2023). Further information can be found here: www.christoph-ernst.com.

Jens Hälterlein is a researcher at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University and scientific coordinator of the ‘Meaningful Human Control – Autonomous Weapon Systems between Regulation and Reflection’ (MEHUCO) project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. He has been publishing on the social dimension of security technologies since 2011 – among others, within the framework of the EU project VideoSense. From 2020 to 2022, he was Principle Investigator of the ‘Artificial Intelligence and Civil Security’ project funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. He has many years of research experience in the fields of science and technology studies, surveillance studies, critical security studies and governmentality studies.

Teresa Heffernan is Professor of English Language and Literature at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS. Her current research is on the science and fiction of robotics and AI. Her books include the edited collection Cyborg Futures: Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism (University of Toronto Press, 2016); and Post-Apocalyptic Culture: Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Twentieth- Century Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2008). She runs the following website: https://socialrobotfutures.com

Rebecca L. Jones has published on women’s representation in comics, video games and fantasy adaptations. She is interested in exploring the representation of minority characters within genre fiction, film, television, comics and games. For her master’s degree, she studied the adaptation of Shakespeare within comics, Marvel films and science- fantasy novels, and in her doctorate she examined the representational evolution of female-presenting artificial creations in American and British live-action films.

Xiran Liu is a master’s student in Communication Science at the University of Zurich. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in Social Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her current research interest is the public communication about emerging technologies such as generative AI on social media.

Shimona Mohan is Associate Researcher on Gender & Disarmament and Security & Technology at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Her previous work includes stints at the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the Think20 Secretariat under India’s G20 presidency in 2023, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Ministry of External Affairs as well as NITI Aayog under the Government of India. Her areas of research include the multifarious intersections of security, technology (especially AI and cybersecurity), gender and disarmament.

Jeremy Packer is Professor at the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto. He is the author or co-author of The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2023); Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Duke University Press, 2020); and Mobility Without Mayhem: Cars, Safety, and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 2008). He is also the editor or co-editor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (State University of New York Press, 2003); Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History (Peter Lang Publishing, 2006); Secret Agents: Popular Icons Beyond James Bond (Peter Lang Publishing, 2009); and Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks (Routledge, 2012).

Joshua Reeves is Associate Professor at the School of Communication at Oregon State University. He is the author or co- author of The Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (University of Minnesota Press, 2023); Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Duke University Press, 2020); and Citizen Spies: The Long Rise of America’s Surveillance Society (New York University Press, 2017). He serves as an associate editor of Surveillance & Society and is a director of the Surveillance Studies Network.

Jennifer Rooke served 24 years as an intelligence officer in the US Air Force upon graduation from the Air Force Academy until her military retirement in 2013 at the rank of colonel. She worked across a breadth of organizational levels, in operational squadrons and headquarters staff. These included assignments as a director of operations and a commander of intelligence squadrons, as well as staff positions within Headquarters Air Force, the National Security Agency, US European Command in Germany and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. She also held senior intelligence officer positions at US Air Forces in Europe, headquartered in Germany, and at NATO Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum, headquartered in the Netherlands.

Elke Schwarz is Reader (Associate Professor) in Political Theory at Queen Mary University London. She works at the intersection of ethics of war and ethics of technology with an emphasis on unmanned and autonomous/intelligent military technologies and their impact on warfare.

Bernhard Seidl is Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna. His research interest is focused on exploring metapragmatic discourse and current social discourses in Japan through the use of text corpora. An avid fan of rakugo, the Japanese art of humorous storytelling, he has also dabbled in research on modern performing arts in Japan.

Lucy Suchman is Professor Emerita of the Anthropology of Science and Technology at Lancaster University. Before taking up that post, she was a principal scientist at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where she spent 20 years as a researcher. Her current research extends her longstanding critical engagement with the fields of artificial intelligence and human- computer interaction to the domain of contemporary militarism. She is concerned with the question of whose bodies are incorporated into military systems, how and with what consequences for social justice, and the possibility for a less violent world.

Jinyu Wang studies Communication Design in Saarbrücken, Germany. Her work focuses on providing visual insights into the challenges of humanity in modern society, aiming to provoke greater attention and deeper thought on complex moral issues.

Jutta Weber is a Science and Technology Studies scholar and Professor for Media, Culture and Society at Paderborn University. Her research focuses on computational technoscience culture(s), asking how and for whom the (non)human actors work. She has been visiting professor at Uppsala (Sweden), Vienna (Austria) and Twente (the Netherlands). She is lead of the competence network ‘Meaningful Human Control: Autonomous Weapon systems between Regulation and Reflection’; you can find more information here: www.juttaweber.eu; www.mehuco.de

Johannes Weilandt works as a visual artist in Berlin. He studied fine art at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin and graduated as a master’s student in 2022. His mostly serial drawings have been nominated for several awards and are represented in various exhibitions.