Issue 21: Medicine and the Body

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 groun