The true risk underlying all of these is unaccountable, concentrated power.

In 2020, approximately 72 projects were openly researching AGI across 37 countries. These are primarily corporate and academic projects. About half of these are in the US and eight of the nine projects that have military connections are in the US.

Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. Some of these fossil fuel giants have funded a complex of firms, think tanks and scientists that have been responsible for sewing doubt on climate science.

Nato is setting up a €1bn VC fund to invest in early-stage defence tech companies. Backed by 22 of the military alliance’s 30 members (but excluding the US), this innovation fund is currently putting together an investment team, which will operate on an independent and commercial basis.

Nato also launched a startup accelerator called Diana (Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic) to focus on several key technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum communication and computing, biotechnology, new materials and spacetech.

“We see commercial technologies now being very quickly adapted to use in military situations.”

Built by SRC Inc, it packs the maximum computing capacity into the minimum space, with the lowest possible power requirements. Its modular architecture is built around machine learning (suggesting a lot of GPUs or other processors optimized for parallel processing) and the makers anticipate upgrades to neuromorphic computing hardware which mimics the human brain.

An Air Force slide of the Agile Condor concept of operations shows the drone losing both its communications link and GPS navigation at the start of its mission. An existing Reaper would circle in place or fly back to try and re-establish communications; the AI-boosted version uses its AI to navigate using landmarks and find the target area – as well as spotting threats on the ground and changing its flight path to avoid them.

the Pentagon’s policy on ‘human judgement’ is sufficiently vague to allow it to mean whatever they decide is in their best interests at the time:

Military technology is still dominated by human-assisted artificial intelligence-enabled weapon systems. Full spectrum autonomous artificial intelligence weapon systems may still be two decades away.

Pitched battles and close combat, except in built-up areas, have been conspicuous by their absence. The effectiveness of tanks, aircraft, attack helicopters, and artillery as major battle-winning factors has been neutralised to a great extent. The outcome of battles is now decided by Precision-Guided Munitions (PGMs), delivered by aircraft, helicopters, drones and ground-based weapon systems backed by an effective cyber and electronic warfare proof Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (C4ISTAR) system

Autonomous Truck Mounted Howitzer System (ATMOS) 155mm self-propelled guns which will be seeing action in conflict areas in Mindanao.

I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.

t was on the basis of such flimsy emotional clues that I found myself feeling with these imaginary strangers: feeling with them, for them, alongside them and through them, extrapolating from my own emotions, which, though strikingly minor when compared to the high dramas of fiction, still bore some relation to them, as all human feelings do. The voices of characters joined the ranks of all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my “own voice” indistinct. Or maybe it’s better to say: I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

Any story or novel is an assertion of a world that is true—so the question is not, is this real, does this match up with real life, but, within the bounds of this story, does this detail or incident follow the narrative logic?

historical fiction works in much the same way; it exists in two dimensions—the real and the imagined, and in two spheres—the collective and the personal.

historical fiction as a revelation of truths particular to these specific characters and the sensibilities of this individual writer.

Imprinting imagination on the real, and the individual experience on the collective, has the capacity to humanize history and connect the present day reader to our collective past.

In her study of documentaries about the Cambodian genocide, the Israeli film scholar Raya Morag speaks of “Perpetrator Cinema,” which allows survivors to confront their aggressors in “a direct, non-archival, face-to-face confrontation,” which in turn opens a space for transforming power relations and creating a different form of ethics. Kedar’s film sits firmly in the genre of “perpetrator trauma,” creating a confessional silo in which the soldiers speak only to her, the Israeli insider who can coax their guilty or prideful confession. We are witness to snippets of recollections and the performance of violence as the soldiers recount the beatings, a method that invokes Joshua Oppenheimer’s haunting 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” about the mass executions of accused communists in Indonesia in the 1960s.

The collective sketch is a fitting document of the callousness, discomfort, and suppressed guilt that marks contemporary Israeli society and its dehumanizing treatment of Palestinians. As with the destruction of Palestinian villages in the 1948 war, what happened in St. Joseph’s schoolyard was never entirely hidden from view. In 1990, for example, Shezaf himself wrote of the war crime in a widely read four-page cover spread in the Hebrew newspaper Hadashot, sharing his own diaries and meditating on the limits of his ability to stop the beatings.

The Israeli public’s embrace and the early release of Elor Azaria — a convicted army medic who was caught on camera shooting dead a writhing Palestinian attacker on a Hebron street corner well after he had been immobilized in 2016 — is a clear indicator of how the boundaries of acceptable violence are shifting. As Azaria’s case shows, although some war crimes may now be documented and admitted, the impunity remains. To speak on camera instead becomes another venue in the Israeli search for exoneration, without ever having to face real accountability.