About this event
Book Manuscript Workshop – Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine, with author Dr Sophia Goodfriend, Guggenheim Research Fellow, University of Cambridge
The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life, the Edinburgh Centre for International Global Law and the Centre for Technomoral Futures are delighted to support:
This day long workshop will discuss the draft manuscript of Dr Goodfriend’s book entitled Automating Warfare in Israel Palestine (in contract with Princeton University Press). Commentators on the book include Professor Toby Kelly FBA (Professor of Legal Anthropology, University of Edinburgh), Professor Louise Amoore FBA (Durham University and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life), Tabitha Bonney (Senior Operational Lawyer, Ministry of Defence), Dr Gavin Sullivan (UKRI Future Fellow and Reader in International Human Rights Law, University of Edinburgh), Professor Nehal Bhuta (Chair of Public International Law, University of Edinburgh) and Dr Dimitri van den Meerssche (Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary University School of Law).
Automating Warfare in Israel and Palestine offers an ethnographic portrait of how large language models and big-data analytics - technologies often glossed as AI - are transforming what it means to wage and live with war across Israel and Palestine. Based on over five years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with civilians and soldiers at the crosshairs of war and occupation, this manuscript reads the entrenchment of regional violence through the proliferation of automated surveillance and weapons systems. Automating Warfare begins in the early 2000s, as Israel’s digital surveillance apparatus across Palestine expanded amidst the violence of the Second Intifada and receding visions of regional peace. It concludes more than two decades later, amidst the proliferation of AI-powered surveillance and weapons systems guiding Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza strip. Tailored to a general readership, Automating Warfare illustrates how the steady automation of Israel’s military arsenal entrenches violence in radically uneven ways. The data collection undergirding predictive policing and automated targeting embedded the Israeli army into intimate domains of Palestinian life. Cameras peering into private homes, social media scraping tools, wiretaps and location monitoring were the condition of possibility for military developments in AI. Yet for Israelis tasked with developing such systems, the rise of recommendation systems, speech to text software, and automated translation eroded individual’s capacities for moral reasoning and ethical decision making. If social scientific accounts of automated weapons systems tend to focus on their extraordinary impact on geopolitics and warfighting, my research theorizes the ordinary - but no less debilitating- lived effects of AI assisted warfare.
Note that lunch will be available for speakers and invited commentators only.
If you are unable to register for any reason, please contact Nehal Bhuta: nehal.bhuta@ed.ac.uk