Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Public Policy
Episode: Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025)
Description: Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algori...