Paola Gaeta and Marta Bo interview Dr. Giacomo Persi Paoli, Programme Lead for Security and Technology Programme at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). In this episode he talks about the next generation of lethal autonomous weapons systems – robot swarms –  and their technical and operational features. 

Giacomo Persi Paoli is the author of Swarm Robotics: Technical and Operational Overview of the Next Generation of Autonomous Systems (with Merel Ekelhof) (UNIDIR 2020). 

For more information on the Lethal Autonomous Weapons and War Crimes research project, visit our website https://lawsandwarcrimes.com

Paola Gaeta and Abhimanyu George Jain interview Dr. Kenneth Payne, Reader in International Relations at King’s College London, where he conducts research in political psychology. In this episode, he talks about how lethal autonomous weapons systems will affect military strategy and change the nature of armed conflict. 

Kenneth Payne is the author of I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict (Hurst, 2021), Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence (Georgetown University Press, 2018), ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Revolution in Strategic Affairs?’ 60(5) Survival (2018) 7-32, and ‘Strategy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ (with Kareem Ayoub), 39(5-6) Journal of Strategic Studies (2016) 793-819. 

For more information on the Lethal Autonomous Weapons and War Crimes research project, visit our website https://lawsandwarcrimes.com 

Paola Gaeta and Marta Bo interview Dr. Ingvild Bode, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern Denmark, where she leads an ERC research project on autonomous weapons systems and international norms (AUTONORMS). In this episode, she talks about what meaningful human control means and how lessons learned from existing automated systems can guide our understanding of meaningful human control in relation to lethal autonomous weapons. 

Ingvild Bode is the author of Meaning-less human control: Lessons from air defence systems on meaningful human control for the debate on AWS (with Tom Watts, 2021) and ‘The future of remote warfare? Artificial intelligence, weapons systems and human control’ (with Hendrik Huelss) in A. McKay, A. Watson, & M. Karlshøj-Pedersen (Eds.), Remote warfare: Interdisciplinary perspectives, 218-233 (E-International Relations Publishing, 2021).

For more information on the Lethal Autonomous Weapons and War Crimes research project, visit our website https://lawsandwarcrimes.com