Rethinking the Political / -Science- / Fiction Nexus: Global Policy Making and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

Carpenter, Charli

doi:10.1017/s1537592715003229

Cited by 40 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…It consolidates the dominant logic that 'guns don't kill people, people do' (Latour 1999, p.174) and problematizes the hypothetically reversed logic that 'guns don't kill people, cyborgs do' (Bourne 2012, p.141). The prohibitionary character of Killer Robots is also co-constituted by deeply rooted science fiction and popular culture images and stereotypes (Carpenter 2016). Countless sci-fi films and novels play a remarkable role in creating the image of a robot that could potentially become self-aware and disobey its programming (Krishnan 2009, pp.7-8).…”

Section: Productive Power: Nascent Stigmatization Of a 'Politicized' Categorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

Hynek

Solovyeva

2020

AI & Soc

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The purpose of this article is to provide a multi-perspective examination of one of the most important contemporary security issues: weaponized, and especially lethal, artificial intelligence. This technology is increasingly associated with the approaching dramatic change in the nature of warfare. What becomes particularly important and evermore intensely contested is how it becomes embedded with and concurrently impacts two social structures: ethics and law. While there has not been a global regime banning this technology, regulatory attempts at establishing a ban have intensified along with acts of resistance and blocking coalitions. This article aims to reflect on the prospects and limitations, as well as the ethical and legal intensity, of the emerging regulatory framework. To allow for such an investigation, a power-analytical approach to studying international security regimes is utilized.

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Section: Productive Power: Nascent Stigmatization Of a 'Politicized' Categorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

Hynek

Solovyeva

2020

AI & Soc

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“…Fantastical narratives do not surrender their political truth under interrogation; rather we trace the content of politics through rival interpretations of the fantastical. The means of establishing how artefacts are received and reinterpreted will vary with methodological preference (again, see Carpenter 2016).…”

Section: Dreams Must Explain Themselvesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…SF thus both predicts, and indeed causes, futures (Disch 1998;cf. Sargent 1994, 26-28;Carpenter 2016). As some saw it, what was science fiction to the 1940s was science fact by the 1960s.…”

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confidence: 99%

Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds

Kirby

2017

International Studies Review

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To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds that we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far."-Cecil Rhodes (in Stead 1902, 190) "[W]hen people ask me, Why do you write about men … I say, because I like to write about aliens. It's very flip, it's also very true. I'm fascinated by this attempt to get into the Other."-Ursula K. Le Guin (in Delany 1977, 277) Speculative Frictions Cecil Rhodes was a fervent advocate of imperial expansion, and yet confessed himself unsatisfied by the territories of the earth. 1 Ursula K. Le Guin, opposed to Rhodes in matters of politics, nevertheless cast radicalism in extra-planetary terms. Rhodes the imperialist belongs to the true history of blood and conquest, but dreamt of the impossible. Le Guin the author explores the ideological predicaments of the 20th century by removing her protagonists from any recognisable timeline. 2 Both imagined the stars as an extension of the earth by other means, a speculative antechamber, catacomb and satellite, in ceaseless communion with worldly politics. The admixture of the political and the fantastical is no novelty. Science fiction and its cousins have always been understood as disruptive and potentially subversive, most obviously when they served as satires on great persons or forewarnings of disaster, but also as summations of 1 Ronnie Lipschutz notes a similar tendency in the 20th century Westphalian imagination writ large: "the stars offered a vista of limitless lebensraum" (2003, 79). 2 Le Guin is equally famous as the author of the Earthsea fantasy series (starting with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968) and such works of science fiction as The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971) and The Dispossessed (1974). the mood of an epoch. There has always been reason, as Brian Aldiss recalled of the 1960s, "to think of SF as ammunition in a global battle". 3 Today, the observation that non-realist fiction may be read politically is, if anything, a commonplace. In the fragmented quasidiscipline of International Relations (IR), pop cultural scholarship has evolved from a minority to a mainstream pursuit. 4 And of all the forms of cultural narrative taken up by IR, science or speculative fiction (SF or sf) has been the most popular. 5 An emergent sub-subfield its own right, the interface of SF and IR (henceforth SF/IR) exemplifies a spreading pluralism of topic and method. IR engages SF at multiple depths: as a teaching aid (e.g. Drezner 2011; Weber 2001; Ruane and James 2012; Clapton and Shepherd 2016); as a way to communicate IR concepts to a broader public (e.g. Carpenter 2012; Sterling-Folker and Folker 2006); and as a field for analysis in its own right (e.g. Dittmer 2013; Shepherd 2013). At each level, it is supposed that fundamental features of politics-the contest over which persons and collectives may exercise power, and over whom-are expressed with a certain force by an artistic genre that at first glance ...

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“…The use of zombies in the classroom for simulations, and as a tool for teaching theory, all reflect the fact that cultural memes are effective in reaching students and policy communities. As Charli Carpenter asserts, the role of science fiction and fantasy discourse can act to deflect disagreement in 'divergent and highly contested policy communities' 2 and allows for more communication on important, emotionally charged issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

Fishel

Wilcox

2017

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

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The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We read The Walking Dead as a zombie narrative that could provide a critical basis for rethinking the concepts of bare life and the exception to consider ‘living on’ in apocalyptic times.

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Rethinking the Political / -Science- / Fiction Nexus: Global Policy Making and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

Cited by 40 publications

References 28 publications

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

Operations of power in autonomous weapon systems: ethical conditions and socio-political prospects

Political Speech in Fantastical Worlds

Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

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