Autonomous Weapons in Fiction and the Fiction of Autonomous Weapons
Journal: Bristol University Press eBooks
Year: 2025

Language that credits machines with such traits as thinking and autonomy often draws on literal readings of fiction to animate real machines. Yet, this presentation of ‘autonomous’ machines miraculously springing from fiction distracts from the real-world development of this technology. Modelled on the much-critiqued theory of the autonomous liberal subject, which fails to account for the ways in which humans extend into networks that exceed individual cognition, the ‘autonomy’ of weapons simila