Death Machines with Professor Elke Schwarz

Professor Elke Schwarz is Professor of Political Theory at Queen Mary University of London. Her work bridges philosophy, ethics and technology to examine how emerging military and digital systems reshape war, violence and political practice. She investigates how autonomous weapons, military AI, drones and the defence-technology complex challenge traditional moral, political and legal frameworks. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies and publishes widely on the ethical implications of algorithmic systems in warfare.

In this episode, Elke draws on Hannah Arendt's concept of world-alienation to carefully build the case for the emergence of military drones as the logical outcome of a series of developments beginning around the time of the Reformation. Owing to the loss of their property, peasants grounded in local communities and life-worlds were reduced to alienated workers whose basic biological needs for food and shelter became paramount. Later, with the rise of Darwinism, society came to be seen as a biological organism (the body politic) with growth as its teleological goal, and so the ends of statecraft came to be understood as fulfilling the biological needs and health of this organism. Hence, in time, drones emerged as the perfect vector for protecting the body politic from external threats by “excising the cancer of terrorism”, for example. It is not that drones fulfil this role only because they place their pilots beyond physical harm — indeed, drone pilots experience high levels of PTSD — but also because they attempt to place warfare itself in an algorithmic, supposedly neutral technical zone beyond ethical reproach. Ultimately, however, algorithmic drone warfare can never be truly ethical precisely because ethics resides in the uncertain and incalculable terrain where difficult choices must be made.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Political Theory and Technology

02:51 Arendt's Critique of Darwin and Marx

06:02 World Alienation and the Human Condition

09:03 The Nature of Violence in Politics

11:54 Drones: The New Age of Warfare

14:42 Ethics and Algorithmic Warfare

17:27 The Distancing Effect of Drones

20:22 The Role of Machines in Warfare

23:15 Conclusion: The Ethics of Drone Warfare