Military AI, Venture Capital and the Hype of War

Описание: How is venture capital transforming military AI – and what are the consequences when the logics of Silicon Valley enter the domain of warfare?

We are in the midst of a military AI bonanza. At security and defence trade fairs, artificial intelligence (AI) is presented as the inevitable and indispensable technology that will determine the future of military effectiveness.

With this amplified interest in defence AI, a new financial actor has entered the military domain: venture capital. In the United States, VC investment in defence startups has skyrocketed. A similar trend is noticeable in Europe, where billions are being funneled into AI-drone startup companies, spurred by escalating conflicts around the globe. VC investment is a "high-risk, high-reward" way of financing military technologies, requiring fast-paced exponential growth at scale ("blitzscaling") and the disruption of existing markets.

But with disruption comes debris. What happens when military organisations, which must navigate ethical questions pertaining to life and death, become shaped in the image of Silicon Valley and VC funding? This talk with Professor Elke Schwarz (Queen Mary University of London) traces the ways in which military AI, venture capital, and military organisation become entangled – financially, operationally, and semiotically – in ways that may enroll the globe into even greater instability for the foreseeable future.

Elke Schwarz holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), an MA in Conflict Studies from the War Studies Department at King’s College London (KCL) and a Bachelor in Business Studies from Belmont University (USA). Her work focuses on the nexus of ethics, technology and politics / warfare with a specific emphasis on new and emerging military technologies, including military Artificial Intelligence, autonomous weapon systems, drones and robots.

She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (Manchester University Press) and her work on military AI and autonomous weapon systems has been widely published in a range of international publications. She is Vice-Chair of the International Committee of Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), an Associate of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and an RSA Fellow. Elke is also a 2022/23 Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies (CAPAS) Fellow and 2024 Leverhulme Research Fellow with a project on the politics of apocalyptic AI. She works with a number of civil society organisations and serves on several editorial boards for publications and book series on politics and technology.

Program:
13.00-13.40 Presentation by Professor Elke Schwarz

13.40-14.00 Panel Discussion

14.00-14.30 Q&A