Fellow 2022-2023ELKE SCHWARZ
Term: 10/2022 – 03/2023
Elke Schwarz is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Queen Mary University London (QMUL) and Director of TheoryLab at QMUL’s School of Politics and International Relations. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, war, and technology, especially in connection with autonomous or intelligent military technologies and their impacts on contemporary warfare. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies (Manchester University Press, 2018), and her work has been published in a range of journals across the fields of security studies, philosophy, military ethics, and international relations.
Over the last 10 years, she has been involved in a number of policy initiatives through various international NGOs and think tanks on issues related to the use of drones, autonomous weapons systems, and military Artificial Intelligence. She is an RSA Fellow and a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC). She is also co-series editor for the Springer Verlag series, “Frontiers in International Relations” and Associate Editor for the journal New Perspectives.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW ELKE SCHWARZ
Whose Robo-Apocalypse is it anyways? Power, politics, posthumanism
The political stakes of contemporary forms of apocalyptic imagination around AI are high. We are familiar with some of the patterns of this imaginary from sci-fi texts, popular culture, and hyperbolic media accounts, but when tech experts today espouse warnings and advice about how to forestall or hasten the end of civilization through further investment in AI and related technologies, they remix elements from these and other diverse strands of thought. Apocalyptic thinking in relation to AI and posthumanism therefore extends in multiple directions, assuming new forms with significant implications for politics and power, both now and in the future. In this research, I focus on the implicit ‘revelation’ that comes with these diverse narratives of robo-apocalypse and ask, what is the role of these accounts in shaping future politics. The first stage of the project aims to clarify the structural parameters of apocalyptic AI narratives across a range of fields, including pop culture, academia, and the general media, but with a specific focus on expert circles. The second stage examines the ‘eschatological ambiguities’ that accompany such narratives and asks how power circulates and is wielded through these.