Machine guardians: The Terminator, AI narratives and US regulatory discourse on lethal autonomous weapons systems

Abstract

References to the Terminator films are central to Western imaginaries of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS). The puzzle of whether references to the Terminator franchise have featured in the United States’ international regulatory discourse on these technologies nevertheless remains underexplored. Bringing the growing study of AI narratives into a greater dialogue with the International Relations literature on popular culture and world politics, this article unpacks the repository of different stories told about intelligent machines in the first two Terminator films. Through an interpretivist analysis of this material, we examine whether these AI narratives have featured in the US written contributions to the international regulatory debates on LAWS at the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons in the period between 2014 and 2022. Our analysis highlights how hopeful stories about what we coin ‘machine guardians’ have been mirrored in these statements: LAWS development has been presented as a means of protecting humans from physical harm, enacting the commands of human decision makers and using force with superhuman levels of accuracy. This suggests that, contrary to existing interpretations, the various stories told about intelligent machines in the Terminator franchise can be mobilised to both support and oppose the possible regulation of these technologies.

Algorithmic Warfare: Taking Stock of a Research Programme

“…And third, the cultural circulation of popular imaginaries of weaponised AI raises the ontologically thorny question of whether, and if so to what degree, the international regulatory debates on algorithmic warfare have been shaped by popular culture. In particular, it invites further study of the relationship between "popular" and what we coin "institutionalised" AI imaginariesthat is, those circulated within defence departments (Suchman 2022) and other branches of government (Bareis and Katzenbach 2022;Watts and Bode 2023).…”

Terminator: de la fuerza a la inteligencia. Una reflexión sobre narrativas sociales de la IA y educación

“…En un mundo cada vez más tecnologizado, las narrativas de inteligencia artificial (IA) desempeñan un papel crucial en la configuración de nuestra comprensión y expectativas colectivas de esta revolucionaria frontera tecnológica. La influencia de las representaciones sociales de la IA como las presentadas en la saga de películas Terminator, no solo se limita al ámbito del entretenimiento, sino que se extiende a las discusiones académicas de tipo ético, regulatorio y de influencia en la formación de políticas y actuaciones en la vida real (1). En esta editorial quisimos hacer una analogía de la evolución de la narrativa de la IA en el cine y cómo se refleja en aspectos de la sociedad, entre ellos, en la educación.…”