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New Report Warns of the Rise of Killer Robots
Public Citizen says autonomous weapons "inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing."
Feb 29, 2024
A Public Citizen report released on Thursday outlines the risks of the Pentagon adopting the use of autonomous weapons on the battlefield and how this could occur in the not-too-distant future.
The report focuses on the Pentagon's efforts to utilize artificial intelligence in various ways and the American military contractors that are developing weaponry that utilizes AI, including autonomous weapons.
"The single greatest concern involving AI and the Pentagon is the integration of AI into weapons systems such that they can function autonomously, delivering lethal force without intervention or meaningful human control," the report state. "The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law."
"Autonomous weapons are already in development around the world and racing forward."
Though the Pentagon has instituted some policies to ensure AI will be used ethically by the military, the report states, these policies don't go as far as to ban the use of autonomous weapons—often referred to as "killer robots."
Furthermore, the report notes that military contractors like General Dynamics, Vigor Industrial, Anduril Industries, and others are currently developing unmanned tanks, submarines, and drones.
"As a discrete weapons technology, autonomous weapons deployment is nearly certain to create an AI weapons arms race. That is the logic of international military strategy. In the United States, a geopolitical rivalry-driven autonomous weapons arms race will be spurred further by the military-industrial complex and corporate contractors," the report states. "Autonomous weapons are already in development around the world and racing forward."
Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones. Russia has utilized autonomous drones in Ukraine. The age of the killer robot is here, and Public Citizen warns that the U.S. needs to help prevent the deployment of killer robots from being normalized.
"The United States should pledge not to develop or deploy autonomous weapons, and should support a global treaty banning such weapons," the report states.
Public Citizen also recommends the U.S. adopt policies that prevent using AI to launch nuclear weapons or using deepfakes on the battlefield, which could be used for "influence operations."
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As Palestinian Children in Gaza Face Genocide, We Must Not Remain Silent
Now is not the time to stay quiet. We urgently need a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign.
Nov 07, 2023
Over 2,000 academics and students who specialize in the study of children and childhood, including ourselves, have come together to call for an immediate ceasefire to halt the unfolding Western-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and demand an immediate end to the egregious violation of Palestinian children’s rights.
Signed by students and academics from around the world, this statement draws on decades of research to highlight the immediate and long-term impact of settler-colonialism, occupation, and violence on children’s lives and the importance of speaking out.
The statement proclaims: "For many of us, entering this field of study was motivated by a desire to improve the material, social, and political conditions of life for children globally. We cannot, therefore, sit by as the situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate."
Our research on Palestinian childhood shows the incredible capabilities of Palestinian children to negotiate meaning and find beauty in the most traumatic of conditions. It looks at Palestinian children as active agents and meaning-makers who, despite the circumstances of the birth lottery, manage to find and cultivate beauty in their lives.
It focuses on how the adults around these children—parents, grandparents, carers, teachers, politicians—fearful for what the future holds for this next generation, protect and control this space of perceived innocence.
Our research, focusing on child migration, shows how border regimes operate through practices of containment, forced immobility, and the denial of futures—all strategies operating in occupied Palestine.
But children and young people, whether stuck in place or forced to move, do their utmost to nourish and reclaim futures, not least through caring for people, places, and social justice, much as we see right now in Gaza.
Moral duty
As researchers who have built our academic careers not only studying childhood, and doing what we do to help improve the conditions of marginalized children's lives, including those in Palestine, we view it as our moral duty to speak out and demand our governments put an immediate end to the Israeli campaign against Gaza.
The unprecedented scale and violence of these attacks compound the longstanding suffering of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Yet, there is a lack of will, even a refusal, on the part of many powerful Western governments to call for a ceasefire. Now is not the time for our silence.
The First Intifada, which broke out in December 1987, generated a mass of interest and research on Palestinian children, both from international academics and international non-governmental organizations. The research and resulting social welfare programs either frame children as victims of the conflict or active participants. But neither adequately addresses the contexts or complexities of Palestinian children's lives.
No one is born a victim; people are made vulnerable and victimized by acts of violence and repression, just like those Palestinian children and adults forced into life imprisonment in Gaza, Israel's open-air prison.
In the public imagination, there remains an unquestioned affinity between the concept of "victim" and "child," as both are paradigmatic concepts of passivity and innocence. Viewed as the "ideal victims," children are often constructed as vulnerable, defenseless, innocent, and hence worthy of sympathy and compassion, while adults—especially men—are not.
We have seen this adult-child binary (as well as the gender binary) play out in humanitarian responses in Muslim countries, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, whereby women and children are constructed as perfect victims, worthy of international aid and in need of saving, while adult men are portrayed as violent and responsible for their own suffering.
Our research in the West Bank found that children (especially those under 10) are often depoliticized and viewed as agentless victims. Therefore, projects involving children are popular with Western funders—both individuals and donor organizations—as they allow them to shed colonial guilt without addressing the structural violence of the Israeli occupation.
No one is born a victim; people are made vulnerable and victimized by acts of violence and repression, just like those Palestinian children and adults forced into life imprisonment in Gaza, Israel's open-air prison.
At the same time, children and young people have been the driving force of the two Intifadas. Palestinian children make complex decisions about how to survive, act, and resist while enduring unimaginable violence and subjugation and have inspired supporters of liberation, justice, and freedom around the world.
Cold, reckless calculation
In the current war on Gaza, one Palestinian child is killed every 15 minutes, in what Gaza-based surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah has called a war on children and Israeli historian and expert in Holocaust studies Raz Segal deemed a “textbook case” of genocide.
Despite the high stakes, no one with the power to avert this genocide is looking out for Gaza's children. It is as if these young people are not seen as children or are excluded from the category of childhood altogether. This can be understood as an effort of Israel and its Western backers to sidestep humanitarian law and public sympathies for "innocent children."
It is evident that Israel’s current actions are not about self-defense.
Given the scale of the suffering of children in Gaza, the refusal of the UK government and the supposedly left-leaning leader of the opposition to support calls for a ceasefire has been horrifying but not surprising.
It was, after all, the British government’s Balfour Declaration, a cold and reckless calculation of British imperial interests, that laid the foundation of the Israeli state by proclaiming support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with little consideration of its indigenous Palestinian population.
While the British government has never really pressured Israel toward a ceasefire in past escalations, it has at least pretended to care about civilian loss and "innocent children" and made noises about peace. The Labour Party has never been this timid. The colonial mindset remains deeply entrenched, as do the cold calculations that allow and justify the violence.
Decontextualizing and dehistoricising the current atrocities and framing them as the Israel-Hamas war or the Israel-Gaza war, frames all Gazans, including the 47 percent under 18, as Hamas and hence complicit in their own suffering. This plays straight into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's expansionary project of annexing the occupied Palestinian territories
For it is evident that Israel’s current actions are not about self-defense. Thousands of Palestinians from Gaza with Israeli work permits were rounded up, imprisoned, and sent back to the besieged strip, and medical visas were canceled for those getting treatments in Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem.
Since the current escalation, at least 150 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank. As Hamas wields no power in the West Bank, these deaths—like those of the nearly 4,000 Gazan children killed—do not fit neatly into the narrative of Israel defending itself and hence remain unaccounted for.
Intimidation tactics
Using the 7 October date as the reference point for the start of escalation omits the history of 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine and the 17-year blockade that has suffocated the Gaza Strip. This decontextualization stops the world from viewing the Palestinian cause as a just one, therefore stripping it of the right to receive international support, such as the demand for a ceasefire.
Writing this piece as a Muslim and an anti-Zionist Jew, we await the backlash and the hate mail. The hypocrisy over free speech and academic freedom has hit a new low, as student groups in the UK are banned for their pro-Palestinian stance and U.S. universities lose funding for not condemning the Hamas attacks fast enough.
Unsurprisingly, it is Palestinian academics facing the brunt of this repression. As a result of signing the statement calling for a ceasefire, our distinguished Palestinian colleague Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, was asked to step down from her position at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The news was circulated in the Israeli mainstream media, leading to further threats against Shalhoub-Kevorkian and her family.
Such intimidation tactics are also being used against academics of color. In the UK, two scholars of South Asian descent were singled out for their lawful expressions of solidarity with Palestinians on social media, and harassed by the Daily Mail, the UK’s largest tabloid.
Retaliations against non-Zionist Jews who speak out are also on the rise; they are denounced as traitors in Israel, and face real threats to their livelihoods and security from the state and its right-wing backers.
The threat to academics’ job security, however, pales in comparison to the recent horrors unleashed on the besieged Gaza Strip.
We therefore affirm the calls of the statement of international childhood scholars and students. We urgently need a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli bombing campaign.
Palestinian children’s lives are precious. All Palestinian lives are precious.
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Do American Taxpayers Really Want to Fund Israel's Genocide of the Palestinian People?
Congress should hold public hearings to get an answer to this question.
Nov 03, 2023
Dear Congressional Leaders Sen. Schumer, Rep. Johnson, Sen. McConnell and Rep. Jeffries:
We strongly urge Congress to hold public hearings, with testimony from a broad range of witnesses, before voting on President Biden’s request for an additional $14.3 billion in military funding to further subsidize Israel’s overwhelming military superiority over Hamas in the war that erupted on October 7, 2023.
We believe these questions, among others, should be examined:
1. Why should American taxpayers pay for Israeli military spending incurred because of its stupendous intelligence failure and ongoing genocidal war?
2. Does Israel need the additional aid since the United States already provides Israel $3-4 billion annually and statutorily guarantees it “a qualitative military advantage” over its neighbors?
3. Can the United States afford the $14.3 billion in additional spending with a national debt soaring past $33 trillion, and annual trillion-dollar budget deficits?
4. Israel is among the top 20 global economies in terms of GDP per capita. Could the $14.3 billion be better spent on assisting the world’s 71 million impoverished internally displaced refugees, many created by undeclared, lawless, U.S. wars?
5. Would the military subsidies make the United States even more of a co-belligerent with Israel in a war against Hamas and, under international law, legally responsible for war crimes or genocide?
6. Should the additional $14.3 billion in deficit or unpaid-for funding be conditioned on Israel’s compliance with the laws of war and the Genocide Convention as certified under oath by the President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Defense with an accompanying written explanation? All of these officials have urged the Israeli government to “comply with the laws of war.”
7. How did the Biden Administration come up with the outsized figure of $14.3 billion for a prosperous economic, technological, and military superpower having a greater social safety net for its people than the United States?
Asking the American people for their advice on sending $14.3 billion to Israel for its acknowledged, defense blunders is not difficult. Conservative Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie polled 49,000 people from his impoverished state. They registered overwhelming opposition to sending these billions of dollars for Israel’s daily slaughter of the civilians in Gaza, nearly half of whom are children.
Disaster is courted when the United States races to begin or join military conflicts without measured, sober second thoughts born of hearings and debates that entertain diverse views. The House held no hearings on the ill-fated Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 which expanded the Vietnam War. The Resolution passed unanimously with but 40 minutes of debate. Senate action was only modestly less rash in voting 98-2 to open the gates to a trillion-dollar military disaster.
Congress never inquired whether the Executive Branch’s dubious Domino Theory was fantasy. Indeed, Vietnam today is an ally of the United States.
Congress held no hearings before approving the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) with but one dissenting vote, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA). After spending more than $2 trillion fighting the Taliban over 20 years, the United States de facto conceded defeat in 2021 with an even more militant version of the Taliban now in power in Afghanistan.
Such hearings will not place Israel in jeopardy. Hamas is no existential threat. And all the world can see Israel pulverizing Gaza daily, including its civilian population, half of whom are children, with brutal air and land attacks on critical civilian infrastructure.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader, Esq.
Bruce Fein, Esq.
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