Laws of War

Laws of War

Top of Mind with Julie Rose

Laws of War, Chocolate Milk, Sex Trafficking and Tech

Episode: Laws of War, Chocolate Milk, Sex Trafficking and Tech

  • Apr 20, 2015 9:00 pm
  • 33:56 mins

Guest: Eric Jensen, BYU law professor The law of war is Top of Mind today as we kick things of with our monthly visit from BYU international law expert Eric Jensen. He is just back from a conference in Geneva, Switzerland debating the legality of a new generation of drone warfare. We also talk about the Blackwater guards who have recently be sentenced to lengthy prison terms for killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle back in 2007. We also touch on the desertion charge now facing Bowe Bergdahl - the soldier who was freed nearly a year ago in exchange for several high-value Taliban leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay. “I would like to make a brief distinction between this idea of autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence,” says Jensen. “When people talk about killer robots sometimes what comes to mind is 'The Terminator' or a self-thinking machine. This is not what autonomous weapons are. We’re not talking about artificial intelligence, which is a system that can learn on its own and make its own decisions. We’re talking about an autonomous weapons system which means it’s only applying the alga rhythms and instructions that have been given by the human. There is a human putting all the information into that machine and telling that machine how to respond. That is a key difference.”