As military technologies progress at a pace that challenges human cognitive and reasoning capacities, it is becoming ever more difficult to appraise the ethics of their use. In this article I argue that the contours of ethical killing are shaped and constrained by a medical discourse that has its basis in a deeper regime of technobiopolitical expertise. Narratives and representations of drones as surgical, ethical, and wise instruments for counter-terrorism activities not only rely on the rendering neutral of both technology and practice, but also on a conflation of technology with practice as a biopolitical necessity. In this conflation, I argue, the practice of targeted killing is adiaphorized. Images and metaphors of the body politic turn drone strikes into a form of medicine that experts prescribe as a means of treating or preventing political cancers, diseases, and illnesses. Ethics, in turn, is treated as a primarily technical matter-something to be technologically clarified and administered from an expert space beyond the zone of ethical contestation. As long as this is the case, ethics will remain but a cog in our new killing machines.

Our contemporary condition is deeply infused with scientific-technological rationales.These influence and shape our ethical reasoning on war, including the moral status of civilians and the moral choices available to us. In this article, I discuss how technology shapes and directs the moral choices available to us by setting parameters for moral deliberation. I argue that technology is an actant of moral significance to just war thinking, yet this is often overlooked in attempts to assess who is liable to harm in war and to what extent. This omission produces an undue deference to technological authority, reducing combatants, civilians, and scenarios to data points.If we are to develop a maximally restrictive framework for harming civilians in war, which I think should be a goal of just war thinking, then it is imperative that the scientific-technological dimension of contemporary war is given due attention.

Artificial Intelligence as a buzzword and a technological development is presently cast as the ultimate ‘game changer’ for economy and society; a technology of which we cannot be the master, but which nonetheless will have a pervasive influence on human life. The fast pace with which the multi-billion dollar AI industry advances toward the creation of human-level intelligence is accompanied by an increasingly exaggerated chorus of the ‘incredible miracle’, or the ‘incredible horror’, intelligent machines will constitute for humanity, as the human is gradually replaced by a technologically superior proxy, destined to be configured as a functional (data) component at best, a relic at worst. More than half a century ago, Günther Anders sketched out this path toward technological obsolescence, and his work on ‘Promethean shame’ and ‘Promethean discrepancy’ provides an invaluable means with which to recognise and understand the relationship of the modern human to his/her technological products. In this article, I draw on Anders’s writings to unpack and unsettle contemporary narratives of our relation to AI, with a view toward refocusing attention on the responsibilities we bear in producing such immersive technologies. With Anders, I suggest that we must exercise and develop moral imagination so that the human capacity for moral responsibility does not atrophy in our technologically mediated future.

New technologies in communications and networking have shaped the way political movements can be mobilized and coordinated in important ways. Recent uprisings have shown dramatically how a people can communicate its cause effectively beyond borders, through online social networking channels and mobile phone technologies. Hannah Arendt, as an eminent scholar of power and politics in the modern era, offers a relevant lens with which to theoretically examine the implications and uses of online social networks and their impact on politics as praxis. This paper creates an account of how Arendt might have evaluated virtual social networks in the context of their potency to create power, spaces and possibilities for political action. With an Arendtian lens it the paper examines whether these virtual means of "shared appearances" facilitate or frustrate efforts in the formation of political power and the creation of new beginnings. Based on a contemporary reading of her writings, the paper concludes that Arendt's own assessment of online social networks, as spheres for political action, would likely have been very critical.