One of the more specious criticisms of the "stopkillerrobots" campaign is that it is using sensationalist language and imagery to whip up a climate of fear around autonomous weapons. So the argument goes, by referring to autonomous weapons as "killer robots" and treating them as a threat to "human" security, campaigners manipulate an unwitting public with robo-apocalyptic metaphors ill-suited to a rational debate about the pace and ethical...
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War Law, the “Public Conscience” and Autonomous Weapons
In the Guardian this morning, Christof Heyns very neatly articulates some of the legal arguments with allowing machines the ability to target human beings autonomously - whether they can distinguish civilians and combatants, make qualitative judgments, be held responsible for war crimes. But after going through this back and forth, Heyns then appears to reframe the debate entirely away from the law and into the realm of morality: The...
Thursday Morning Linkage
Above, I've posted another photo of the crack Duck blogging team (that's me upper left, my dissertation advisor is lower right). Right now, I'm en route to a conference in Norway so my 22 month old son has prepared the following post of Thursday Morning Linkage. (Well, if he had, there would be lots of posts about dogs. He loves dogs.) In any case, you're stuck with my persistent interest in conservation, energy, and health issues. More polio...
The Three Commandments for Editing a Journal
This brief post started life as a comment on a Facebook discussion thread about peer reviewing practices but I thought it might deserve a wider readership. The question was raised: is it kosher for a journal editor to request information about good reviewers from the author of the manuscript? The general consensus, with which I agree, was that it's fine to request those names because editors are always looking for qualified reviewers, and the...
Rational Choice and Selfishness
In his latest post, PTJ moves us past the worst critiques of "rational choice theory" and focuses on a few more nuanced concerns.1 I'm glad to see the conversation progressing, and this type of exchange is one of the things I love most about academic blogging. However, I find some of PTJ's arguments problematic. I argued last week that most criticisms of "rational choice" amount to attempts to persuade graduate students not to learn a...
Measuring Journal (and Scholarly) Outcomes
Another day, another piece chronicling problems with the metrics scholars use to assess quality. Colin Wight sends George Lozano's "The Demise of the Impact Factor": Using a huge dataset of over 29 million papers and 800 million citations, we showed that from 1902 to 1990 the relationship between IF and paper citations had been getting stronger, but as predicted, since 1991 the opposite is true: the variance of papers’ citation rates around...
How Do Americans Feel About Fully Autonomous Weapons?
According to a new survey I've just completed, not great. As part of my ongoing research into human security norms, I embedded questions on YouGov's Omnibus survey asking how people feel about the potential for outsourcing lethal targeting decisions to machines. 1000 Americans were surveyed, matched on gender, age, race, income, region, education, party identification, voter registration, ideology, political interest and military status. Across...
So Should Policy Schools Have PhD Programs?
So, I teach at a policy school, and though our core pedagogical enterprise is the MA program, we have a small PhD program that is a mix of political science, economics, and maybe a dash of public administration. Though I have not worked closely with that many PhD students, the ones I have worked have been superb. Still, the job market being as it is, it is always tough for graduates of our program, like any other, to land an academic job. The...
Globalizing Human Rights
My colleague and friend James Ron has a new article up at Open Democracy (with Shannon Golden and David Crow) on asymmetric access of global populations to human rights machinery. The article is one in a new Open Democracy series "Open Global Rights," which aims to " relocate the [human rights] conversation away from the west and to the Global South." Ron, Golden and Crow's breakdown of new survey data from Mexico, Colombia, Morocco, and India...
Ken Macleod on Iain Banks
We missed Ken Macleod's public eulogies for Iain Banks: he did an interview for As it Happens, wrote an article in The Guardian, and has some brief personal words on his blog. From the conclusion of his Guardian piece: The reputation and reception of Iain Banks as a mainstream author may fluctuate in the future. His verve and talent will always be recognised, and his work will always find and enthrall new readers, but tastes change...
A Certain Kind of Selfishness
This is more of a riff on Phil's post from last week than a direct reply; the post that Dan and I wrote addresses more directly the issue of actor autonomy that we think Phil misunderstood us on we and Phil were clearly on different semantic pages, so I am not going to go back over that ground here. Instead -- and since we all basically agree that rational choice theory, as a species of decision-theoretic analysis, is located someplace in the...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
David Silbey on the long century of the US surveillance state. Don't throw the espionage baby out with the domestic-surveillance bathwater? Tom Nichols throws the gauntlet down at opponents of more active US involvement in the Syrian civil war. Dan Trombly ruminates on the concept of "blowback" in light of recent domestic terror attacks in the west. Developments in Arabic translation. Many people in my circles are gleefully forwarding a...