Search results
cuteness, to science fiction level body machine melding’. Wearables range from ‘the eminently practical’ to the ‘utterly fantastical’. The functions of these digital technologies are not necessarily novel: paper maps have existed for centuries; pedometers date back to the eighteenth century; devices measuring distances cycled or walked, spectacles, prosthetic devices and wristwatches are further examples of historical wearable technologies ( Carter et al. , 2018
If even senior defense officials with responsibility for autonomous weapons programs fail to understand the core issues, then we cannot expect the general public and their elected representatives to make appropriate decisions. 1 Slaughterbots , a video that went viral on YouTube shortly after its release in November 2017, may be one of the most influential drone imaginaries to date. 2 Within a few days it had received more than two million views, even though it was not a Hollywood science fiction trailer but a science communication by arms control
having to adapt rapidly to a continually developing cohabitation with autonomous machines whose presence is often intangible or discrete.’ 13 At once deeply wondrous and deeply troubling, the installation looks back in time to the paranoia-fuelled dystopian science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s (recalling especially the ambiguously sentient white orb known as Rover in the British television series The Prisoner ), but also forward to an uncertain (but near) future in which fleets of autonomous drones conduct ubiquitous surveillance at home and endless wars abroad. It
’s CISOs the ‘clearest, most up-to-date intelligence’ so that the ‘general on the cyber-battlefield … will have the tools they need to win the war’ ( Bernick, 2013 ). ‘Cyber warrior’, once a term from science fiction, has become a job classification essential to internet security ( Judge, 2013b ) and ‘governments around the world are recruiting these cyber warriors to fight against the growing threat of both cybercrime and state-sponsored attacks’ ( Waugh, 2013b ). This has culminated in a scenario where, by 2011, almost all of the world’s major nations had
The Arab–Israeli conflict has been at the centre of international affairs for decades. Despite repeated political efforts, the confrontation and casualties continue, especially in fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. This new assessment emphasizes the role that military force plays in blocking a diplomatic resolution. Many Arabs and Israelis believe that the only way to survive or to be secure is through the development, threat, and use of military force and violence. This idea is deeply flawed and results in missed diplomatic opportunities and growing insecurity. Coercion cannot force rivals to sign a peace agreement to end a long-running conflict. Sometimes negotiations and mutual concessions are the key to improving the fate of a country or national movement. Using short historical case studies from the 1950s through to today, the book explores and pushes back against the dominant belief that military force leads to triumph while negotiations and concessions lead to defeat and further unwelcome challenges. In The sword is not enough, we learn both what makes this idea so compelling to Arab and Israeli leaders and how it eventually may get dislodged.
degree for that very reason, traditionally categorized as popular. These are games, science fiction and fantasy. Despite the fact that the turnover of the gaming industry has been larger than that of the film industry for years, the ways in which this entertainment industry represent diplomacy have not yet been studied (but see Bogost 2007 , 2011 ). Science fiction fastens on the question of what it is to be human. One of the major ways of exploring the issue is by juxtaposing the human species with other animals on the one hand, and with cybernetic beings on the
surrounding AI (especially in societal, economic, and national security debates) are, in large part, caused by the hyperbole and exaggerated depictions of AI in popular culture, and especially science fiction. 53 To be sure, frequent misrepresentations of the potential opportunities and risks associated with this technology in the military sphere can obscure constructive and sober debate on these topics. Specifically, this includes the trade-off between the potential operational, tactical, and strategic benefits of leveraging
to come to Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. With indigenous production in the doldrums, two-thirds of British film investment in 1983 came from US sources. 94 But as the British market became less valuable, the incentive to make films that appealed specifically to British audiences by representing British culture diminished. Thus, the highest-profile British-made films of the era included science fiction and fantasy films such as Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), Alien (1979), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The continued outsourcing of production
remarkable parallel to this peculiar imagination – in particular to the ‘slaughtering of the drones’ – is Jünger’s contemporary science fiction writer colleague, Kurt Vonnegut, whose short story ‘The Drone King’, from the early 1950s, features an experiment in which drones (here, natural male bees) are spared from otherwise inevitable death by a rich madman, who proposes them as an ingenious new means of communication. In contrast to Jünger’s glass bees, however, Vonnegut’s ‘drone kings’ turn out to be a huge failure, since they are not carrying out their communication
to let one’s imagination run “free.” The everyday has acquired new dimensions, where the imagination is no longer restricted to grandmother ’s stories or a Jules Verne novel, but instead runs free across a series of different levels of representation: from reality shows, to science fiction, to the travel channel, to abstract representations such as political cartoons. Sifting through this information is difficult enough for people who grew up with it. For those who started to experience it all at once unexpectedly, one can only imagine the kind of shock they must