Dr Bianca Baggiarini1
1Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Bianca Baggiarini is a political sociologist and lecturer in war and military studies. Her research is on the social, political, and ethical effects of military AI and remote and autonomous systems (RAS). Her book manuscript, Governing Military Sacrifice: Privatization, Drones, and the Future of War (forthcoming) analyses how drones and military privatization together reveal the breakdown of the citizen-soldier archetype and its links to sacrificial idioms. Baggiarini is currently working with a team on a Defence Strategic Policy grant (2024-2027) on the topic of RAS and deterrence theory and practice and is advancing a second project on ‘disembodied’ combat and the future possibility of wartime memory and commemoration. She has recent and forthcoming publications on machine learning and resort-to-force decision making and the discourse of “trusted autonomy.”
Abstract:
Recently, incoming US President and convicted felon Donald Trump was granted partial immunity from prosecution. Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion that “the President is now a king above the law.” Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly informing strategic decisions regarding the use of force (Erskine and Miller, 2024). Considering how far right conservativism in the US is blending with monarchical aspirations (and the return on investment that some AI tech billionaires will expect from Trump) what a king above the law will mean for the democratic legitimacy of AI-enabled war initiation is of urgent concern. In this paper, I claim that democratic wartime decisions require transparency, yet both AI and premodern forms of knowledge have opacity at their core. Akin to God’s wisdom, the reasoning underpinning autocratic intelligence – which fuses high technology with premodern political authority – is deliberately unknowable to mortals. If liberal democracy has it that justified and justifiable force requires that the reasoning underpinning decisions must be scrutable, this condition is undone when AI is regarded – as it so often is – as the source of perfect and incontestable knowledge.