Short circuit: retracing the political for the age of ‘autonomous’ weapons

The spectre of lethal autonomous weapons has drawn increasing interest and concern in recent years as advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have signaled their potential immanence. Long portended in dystopic pop culture conjurings, the figure of the militarized automaton already registers in popular imaginaries in ways that intersect with quotidian understandings of ‘smart bombs’ and ‘surgical strikes’, first made familiar to global publics in the opening days of the 1991 Gulf War and elaborated in its cultural aftermath in everyday forms from cinema to video games, and more. Much in the way of the discourse and semiotics of arms control professionals now grappling with the idea of ‘killer robots’ flows together with and reproduces both these popular renderings and the rhetorical technologies of what has been taken to be a revolution in military affairs driven by watershed developments in advanced weaponry. In so doing, they mystify locations of political subjecthood in ways that might be profoundly disenabling of workable resistance strategies. This also threatens implication in unequal power circulations that have worked to exert an emergent monopoly by the most powerful over legitimate recourse to organized political violence.