Medicine and the Body - Incite at Columbia University

As numerous bioethicists and artificial intelligence researchers have pointed out, technologies of medicine and the body have deep ties with military interests—providing a historical through line whose connections, implied and explicit, emerge throughout this issue. Despite computer science nomenclature that ascribe sentience and autonomy to automated decision-making and weapons systems, technologies narrated with commercial marketing terms like “AI” are embedded in, and direct consequences of, human intention and political insistence.

This issue asks: How can we provide a platform to survivors of systematic attempts at annihilation of their life-worlds funded and enabled—directly or indirectly—by US weapons-development and foreign policy? What is the relationship between computation and the transnational scale of state-sanctioned, extrajudicial vulnerability to premature death? This issue does not offer comprehensive answers to these questions but, rather, seeks to establish the grounds on which they can be posited in the first place.