Comment archive

Tuesday, 13 May 2025
Why Would Humans Do Anything Boring, Difficult or Dangerous in Star Wars? Science Fiction’s Reluctance to Embrace Its Own Technology.

This blog post contains spoilers for the first series in Andor, and other science fiction shows.

Friday, 28 Feb 2025
Contesting the AI-Cybersecurity Nexus: Lessons Learned from the United Kingdom

In an age where so-called artificial intelligence (AI) seems to revolutionise every corner of our lives, it’s no surprise that its intersection with cybersecurity has become a major focus for governments worldwide. Where cybersecurity and AI were previously seen as separate entities, they are increasingly merging together in policy discourse. ...

Friday, 22 Nov 2024
Authorship and Involuntary Attribution: How and Why Should We Contest AI Manipulation?

Technology is radically changing the work and role of scholars and the function of academic publishing. Fake and fabricated content (data, facts, arguments, claims, conclusions) undermines the foundations of knowledge in a democratic society. Faking publications and citations undermine the way we as a community of knowledge producers have organized ...

Tuesday, 9 Apr 2024
The AI Dilemma: Can Artificial Images of War and Suffering Stir Empathy?

Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert explores the pitfalls and potentials of the use of AI to provide windows into humanitarian crises and human rights abuses. AI-generated images have already been used by charities and human rights organizations to illustrate mass suffering and abuse. A lot is potentially at stake as we become ...

Tuesday, 12 Mar 2024
Fake Research Is Threatening Our Democracy

What will happen to public debate and our democracy if we can no longer trust research? Fabricated ‘scientific publications’ could threaten the very foundations of our society. It isn’t ‘fake news’ that scares me, it’s fake research. By this, I don’t mean plagiarism and the failure to provide correct citations, ...

Tuesday, 19 Dec 2023
Optics as Politics: Culture, Language and Learning with UiO ChatGPT

Discussing the case of the University of Oslo ChatGPT and the plight of Palestinians, this blog calls for educators and researchers in peace and conflict studies, to consider the communicative politics of generative AI in their work. Introduction The adoption and adaptation of generative AI in higher education raises important ...

Friday, 1 Sep 2023
Ungovernable or Humanitarian Experimentation? Generative AI as an Accountability Issue

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Kristoffer Lidén discuss the type of accountability challenges generative AI, such as Chat GPT, represents for humanitarian governance. A need to recalibrate humanitarian accountability discussions In the summer of 2023, as the UN convened to discuss generative AI, there were calls for an ethical and responsible governance framework ...

Wednesday, 9 Aug 2023
Hallucinations and Existential Threats — Yet More Power to AI

Every so often, we observe debates around the threats of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Not least from fictional movies and some skeptics. But this debate around promises and perils of AI has, as of late, taken a pivotal turn — with the emergence of AI chatbots such as Chat GPT or ...

Tuesday, 1 Aug 2023
Taking Stock: Generative AI, Humanitarian Action, and the Aid Worker

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik discusses the broader implications of evolving AI for humanitarian action, aid work, and aid workers. Generative AI: From same, same but different to different In the summer of 2023, the UN declared that the International Community Must Urgently Confront New Reality of Generative, Artificial Intelligence. The emergence of generative ...

Tuesday, 21 Dec 2021
Giant Fake Ladybugs on Tanks? The Future of Warfare in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Ethics

In September this year, Chief Software Officer for the U.S. Air Force Nicholas Chaillian, unexpectedly resigned. The reason for his resignation? To protest the slow pace of technological transformation taking place in the U.S. military, and where he argued the U.S. had already lost the race for AI dominance to ...

Monday, 6 Sep 2021
Artificial Intelligence, Warfare, and Bias

When you think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and war, you might find yourself thinking about killer robots, like those we have seen in movies such as The Terminator. In reality, AI and warfare looks quite different from these popularized images, and today we see many countries around the world exploring ...

Friday, 24 Apr 2020
Drones in the Time of Pandemic: Caution Behind the Hype

The fight against the COVID-19 pandemic has mobilized national and international resources of all types, from funding of medical research to financial rescue plans, and has led to widespread state of emergency declarations. While the approaches adopted all over the world have differed from one country to another, an underlying ...

Friday, 14 Feb 2020
Is Legal Technology a New ‘Moment’ in the Law and Development Trajectory?

Introduction This post addresses an emergent field of inquiry for critical geography, namely the transnational dissemination of legal technology for rule of law purposes. Whereas critical attention has been given to digital humanitarianism and the “marketization” of displacement through Big Data (Burns 2019; Taylor and Meissner 2019), little focus has ...

Thursday, 17 Oct 2019
The Iterative Relationship Between Technology and International Security

Scientific breakthroughs and technological innovations are often subject to public discussion about their capacity to affect international security, either by their military exploitation or their uptake and re-appropriation through non-state actors and terrorists. While accompanying proliferation and militarisation concerns are not new, the challenge of governing emerging technologies is as ...

Thursday, 21 Dec 2017
Robot Wars

By Ian G. R. Shaw There isn’t a day goes by without predictions—wild, wacky, and horrifying—about the future of warfare. Robots stand at the centre of so many of these prophecies. Although robots have existed for decades, and even longer in the human imagination, recent leaps in artificial intelligence (AI) ...