Fellow Travelers and Killer Robots, with Kelsey Atherton and Andrew Leber

This week I’m joined by Andrew Leber from Harvard's Department of Government and defense technology journalist Kelsey Atherton to talk about a new briefing book produced by their excellent Fellow Travelers Blog. The book compiles several policy briefs commissioned by FTB over the past several months and is intended to provide some substance for progressive members of Congress looking to steer US foreign policy in a more progressive direction. Toward that end, they’ve started a GoFundMe to support publication and distribution costs, and if you’re able to help out in that regard please do so.

Because I can’t have Kelsey on without talking at least a little bit about drones, we spend a few minutes toward the end of our discussion on recent and somewhat sketchy reports of autonomous drones targeting fighters in Libya and the still nascent movement to craft some international rules of the road about the use of weapons platforms that don’t necessarily require human intervention. We’ll also discuss the proliferation of relatively inexpensive mid-level drones (or in Kelsey’s words “the Honda Civic of drones”) and what it suggests about the future of warfare.

You can find Andrew and Kelsey on Twitter, and I highly recommend checking out Kelsey’s own Substack, Wars of Future Past.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.foreignexchanges.news/subscribe