TechnoEthics and the Politics of Care/Violence

• In Event: Interrupting the Care/Violence Nexus in Times of War and Peace – I

Abstract

In June of 2018, following a campaign initiated by activist employees within the company, Google announced its intention not to renew a US Department of Defense (DoD) contract for Project Maven, an initiative to automate the identification of military targets based on drone video footage. This highly-publicized event presaged wider discussion regarding relations between the US military and the largest of the private tech sector corporations. Framed by defense analysts in the context of an inevitable arms race between the US, Russia and China, the question became how the US military could enroll high tech workers in cooperating in the development of artificially intelligent weapon systems. Understood variously as a clash of values and a failure of communication, these diagnoses prescribed ethical review as a remedy, most prominently in the form of a series of consultations convened by the Defense Innovation Board, a body charged with facilitating DoD/Silicon Valley cooperation. Based on my own participation as a critical expert in this process, this paper considers the ambivalent politics of care/violence. In a context of increasingly asymmetrical and strategically diffuse forms of conflict, the elaboration of sociotechnologies of killing is haunted by the inescapable question of who should be violence’s targets. I close with some reflections on the apparatuses of recognition that enable and justify US militarism, the limits of technoethics to interrupt those apparatuses, and the requirements for a more radical politics of care.

Author

• Lucy Suchman, Lancaster University