Författare: Gemma Ware Host The Conversation Weekly Podcast The Conversa

From Gaza to Ukraine, today’s war zones are being used as testing grounds for new systems driven by artificial intelligence. Billions of dollars are now being pumped into AI weapons technology, much of it from Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Elke Schwarz, who studies the ethics of autonomous weapons systems, about what this influx of new investment means for the future of warfare.

 The insertion of AI into the defence industry is now attracting serious amounts of money. In 2024, the global military AI market was worth an estimated US$13.3 (£10.8) billion, with a projected growth to US$35 billion in the next seven years. Elke Schwarz, a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London in the UK, has just published new research which identifies that a key driver of the growth in military startup products, such as autonomous drones and other AI-enabled systems, is the influx of huge amounts of investment and influence from venture capital firms.

Venture capitalist investors have traditionally been wary of the defence sector. US military contracts tended to be won by a select few large companies and it was an industry deemed difficult to break into. Schwarz says it also remained “ethically frowned upon” to profiteer from conflict. But these “moral qualms were shifted aside very quickly”, she says, once it looked possible to disrupt the defence sector.

In 2016, technology start-up Palantir sued the US Army over what it said were procurement rules that excluded other companies from competing for a particular contract. In 2016, a judge ruled in favour of Palantir’s case and it subsequently secured a contract worth US$823 million. This paved the way for more start-ups to bid for contracts.  In December, the Financial Times reported that Palantir and another defence start-up called Anduril were in talks with around a dozen other tech companies, to create a consortium that would directly bid for US government work.

VC logic heads to the battlefield

Successful start-ups must grow fast and be ambitious if they’re to continue attracting rounds of investment. And this logic influences the narrative around start-ups promoting AI products, says Schwarz.

 You have to make big promises. You have to think big. You need to declare big intentions, possibly unobtainable, but really alluring kind of goals. We’re not saying it’s all fantasy, but certainly there’s an exaggeration to all of that … and you need to make yourself look indispensable, to create a vision of inevitability.

Using this language of inevitability, Schwarz says the most vocal start-up founders and their VC supporters claim that “warfare can only be won with more AI”. They argue that AI systems will allow wars to be won quicker and with more precision than in the past.

But her research questions the implications of inserting AI systems into military decision-making, and in particular, the kill chain. She points to a report by the investigative magazine +972 on Israel’s alleged use of AI-enabled systems in the Gaza war to help identify Hamas militants for targeting by possible air strikes. For Schwarz, such developments suggest that “there can be a tendency to use technologies in a rather indiscriminate, or imprecise fashion, regardless of how accurate they might be”.

And she worries that instead of solving conflict more humanely and with less violence, as AI military champions suggest, these systems might actually “lower the threshold to resort to force”.

Listen to the interview with Elke Schwarz on The Conversation Weekly podcast to find out more. A transcript is available on Apple Podcasts. You can also read an article she’s written for The Conversation’s Insights series about her research.

The Conversation put the points raised in this podcast, and an accompanying article for our Insights series, to the tech and venture capital firms named. They did not respond to our request for comment.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Mend Mariwany and Gemma Ware, with help from Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from DW News, Channel 4 News, AlJazeera English, Pepperdine University, CNBC Television and the a16z American Dynamism Summit.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

Every year, 400 million tons of plastic are produced worldwide, and every year, approximately 57 million tons of plastic pollution is created. And yet in November, the latest round of negotiations on the first legally binding international treaty on plastics pollution ended without an agreement.

Oil-producing countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and Russia, refused to sign up to a clause calling for the world to reduce its production of plastics. As clean energy technologies like electric vehicles gain traction worldwide, these economies are counting on continued and even increased plastic production to buffer them from the economic blow of reduced demand for oil.

So what can we really do about the plastics pollution problem? The Conversation Weekly podcast sat down with Mark Miodowonik, professor of materials and society at UCL in the UK, to understand the history of plastic, how it’s shaped our lives, and what can be done to make sure more plastic is recycled and less ends up polluting the planet.

An advert from the 1930s celebrating bakelite as ‘the material of a thousand uses’.
Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo

In 1907 a chemist called Leo Bakerland invented a new type of rigid, synthetic plastic. He called it bakelite, and it was quickly seized upon by the modernism movement.

“You can start mass producing items in a particular shape and they’re all the same,” explains Miodowonik, who leads the Plastic Waste Innovation Hub at UCL. First telephones, and then radios are manufactured using bakelite. “It’s a huge revolution in the way people think about themselves, how they communicate with the world, who they are … plastic becomes the material of this new era and everyone goes to town with it.”

Because plastic is a big business, the price comes down and it goes from a somewhat luxurious item to an everyday one. Suddenly everything is made of different types of plastic, including disposable packaging for fast food that people are encouraged to throw away.

By the 1970s, scientists working in plastic manufacturing companies were sounding alarms about all the plastic making its way to landfill and how long it took to degrade. But little action was taken, says Miodowonik.

“You can see that the companies obviously don’t want to deal with it. It’s going to cost them money. And us people who are buying this stuff, we went along with it, right? We luxuriated in it. We weren’t too bothered either.”

Making polluters pay

As a result of environmental activists raising the alarm in the 1980s and 1990s, governments and companies slowly started to at least pay lip service to plastic recycling. And these days, there has been a shift in our attitudes toward plastics as people are starting to realise the scale of plastic pollution.

Few plastic manufacturers have faced consequences for their inaction, though these days, there seems to be more of a collective will to take action against them.
In September 2024, the US federal government successfully sued Keurig, the company that makes those little plastic pods that produce one cup of coffee or tea, for claiming that those pods are recyclable when they’re not. Keurig paid US$1.5 million (£1.2m) in penalties.

The state of California in the US has also brought a similar lawsuit against Exxon Mobil alleging that it knowingly made fraudulent claims about the recyclability of its plastic products.

Read more:
Can you trust companies that say their plastic products are recyclable? US regulators may crack down on deceptive claims

Midowonik doesn’t lay the blame solely at the feet of companies like these. He says the inaction of plastic manufacturers to reduce plastic waste is a reflection of our own consumerist society and our desire for cheap stuff. He believes there needs to be a more concerted effort to make polluters pay.

“I think we need to change the laws so that if you make something, you’re responsible for its end of life. You should not be able to sell any product into a market where there’s not a waste processing system in place which can deal with that material.”

Listen to the The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear the full conversation with Miodowonik.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was produced by Gemma Ware and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from NHK World Japan, Today and
CBS News.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

 Zimbabwe is on the cusp of abolishing the death penalty after its Death Penalty Abolition Bill was approved by the Senate on December 12. The bill is now sitting on the desk of Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a known opponent of the death penalty, waiting for his assent. Once it does, it will become the 127th country in the world to abolish the death penalty, and the 27th on the African continent.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to two experts on the death penalty who explain how Zimbabwe got here and what abolition means for both the country, and the continent.

The death penalty was brought to Zimbabwe by colonisation in the 1880s, first by Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa company and then, from 1923 as a self-governing British colony. According to Carolyn Hoyle, director of the Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford, before then people were generally not sentenced to death. She explains:

 ”The traditional idea in the region … Ubuntu which focuses on peace and reparation typically guided responses to serious crime. And there was also this idea of compensation for murder … that the offender’s community would transfer property, maybe a goat, sometimes actually, slightly concerningly, a woman, to the victim’s community.“

But with British colonial rule came the statue of capital punishment, by hanging. After 1965, when Ian Smith’s minority white government declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence over Rhodesia and a 15-year civil war ensued, the number of death sentences rose from 28 in 1965 to 71 in 1968. After Robert Mugabe became prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, the number of executions began to decline significantly.  

The last man to be hanged was a convicted murderer, Mandlenkosi Masina, in July 2005. Since then it has become a de-facto abolitionist country.

The route to abolition

In 2017, Parvais Jabbar, who runs an NGO called the Death Penalty Project as well as being visiting professor of practice alongside Hoyle at the University of Oxford, commissioned research to find out the level of support for the death penalty in Zimbabwe. They found that 61% of 1,200 people surveyed supported the death penalty, but that of those in support, 80% agreed that ”if the government were to decide to abolish the death penalty, we would accept that”.

In subsequent research in 2019, Hoyle also found a high level of support among political, religious and civil society leaders, for abolition. Mnangagwa, who became president in 2017 after Mugabe’s death, has also long been a vocal opponent of the death penalty. In 1965, he was convicted of sabotage during the fight for independence and sentenced to death. He avoided being hung because he was deemed too young, but he spent ten years in prison and the experience shaped his views on capital punishment.

 Just before the outbreak of COVID-19, there had been some debates in parliament about the death penalty, but any progress towards abolition took a back seat during the pandemic. Then in September 2023, Jabbar and Hoyle were invited to Harare to meet with their local partners, a charity called Veritas Zimbabwe, and other politicians sympathetic to the issue. A private members’ bill was brought forward by an opposition MP called  Edwin Mushoriwa. The cabinet then approved the bill in February 2024, and after making its way through various parliamentary stages, the senate finally approved the bill in December.

Once Zimbabwe does abolish the death penalty, it will join Ghana, Zambia and the Central African Republic in doing so in recent years.

Jabbar says this reflects a growing African-centric approach to abolition, rather than one that’s influenced by the west. He also sees it as being a reckoning with colonial-era laws that remain on the statute books.

“ So many of these jurisdictions would say, we never had the death penalty until colonial rule. We used to deal with it in a different way. So I think they are rejecting it as a sort of colonial-era punishment and trying to find something different.”

Listen to the The Conversation Weekly podcast to hear the full interview with Hoyle and Jabbar.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound design was by Michelle Macklem, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via e-mail. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily e-mail here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…