Mr. Sean Rupka1
1UNSW Canberra, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
I am currently finishing a dissertation investigating the broader political effects of the changing nature of the archetypal role of citizen-soldier in modern nation-states, as affected by the increasing technologization of warfare.
Abstract:
This paper investigates the relationship between the shifting experience of war, as affected by the increasing incorporation of remote and autonomous weapons systems, and the ethics of contemporary war. Taking in concert changing attitudes towards warfare, the acceptable application of force in conflict and the changing role of the soldier in an increasingly technological military, I suggest that attempts to apply traditional ethical frameworks to contemporary war fail, because they fail to take into consideration a dissonance between the value systems of human-centric war and algorithmic warfare of the future.
While much analysis on the effects of automation has occurred from the perspective of labor in commercial and industrial sectors (Benanav 2020, Steinhoff 2021, Eubanks 2018) I depart from this context to discuss the outcomes of automation on symbolic forms of labor that are foundational to conceptions of the state and wartime ethics, namely military labor.
Ultimately I suggest that the increasing automation of warfare subtly shifts the ethical grounds on which violence is considered, away from traditional human-centric ethics and into a regime of informational calculability and risk assessment.