*Obviously the activists in this article would be pretty high on the list of people to get repressed by fire and forget killer drones.
(…)
The next day, Wareham and I were sitting outside of the auditorium assessing the current state of the conference. Mexico had come out in favor of a ban, bringing the total up to 12 countries. Wareham added them to The List. But between the UK saying they were interested in “intelligent partnership” and China volleying between citing the limits of AI telling the difference between “baby boys and baby girls” and also suggesting AI would save humanity, all while the Russian delegation smugly stalled on the need for definitions and the US suggested that autonomy in weapons would reduce civilian casualties, I was even more convinced the CCW was among the most ridiculous things I’d ever seen. The only thing keeping me tethered to sanity seemed to be Instagramming photos of the peacocks that freely roam the UN grounds. The head of the US delegation, Michael Meier, walked by us.
“He walked out flashing a [Stop] Killer Robot sticker,” Wareham told me. I was dumbfounded. “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, you know.” Wareham was mid-sentence when another member of the US delegation cut her off.
“Hey, how are you?” the Defense Department representative asked awkwardly, in that way that officials often resemble actual robots. “I was hoping I could get a sticker?”
“Oh, are they all gone?” Wareham asked. “They’re on the table in there.”
Wareham turned back to me and started laughing. “You’re giving out killer robot stickers and that’s the Department of Defense representative saying, ‘I really want a sticker.’” She explained how the representative from Germany got them for his five teenagers, who slapped them on their doors as a kind of “Keep Out” sign. Another diplomat kept them on her office desk to show people. “That’s honestly part of the reason why we did this, to get attention, to have a conversation starter,” Wareham said.
No matter how many times Wareham patiently talked me through it, I still couldn’t see how anything they were doing at the CCW would amount to anything. But members of the campaign believe, really seem to believe, in the power of advocacy in a way that feels like a distant memory of a better time — a time before September 11, before Guantánamo, before Snowden, before global jihad made any US foreign policy decision domestically publicly acceptable…
