Cyberwar, What is it Cybergood For?

While most cyberattacks are civil ones, the discussion about them has been militarized very early on. This is a problem, according to Prof. Noam Lubell, because the consequences are that most of the discussion of regulation of cyber security focuses on the branch of law that deals with military operations. Prof. Lubell is co-author of an article about how AI and machine learning can help states decide whether to resort to force and go to war.

Another issue on Prof. Lubell’s mind is human enhancement in the battlefield. Enhancement as in technologies that improve human skills or add new ones, like a soldier with an exoskeleton suit that makes her stronger and more endurant. Enhanced humans entering this sphere raise an abundance of practical, technological, biological and ethical questions. Among them: are enhanced soldiers humans or weapons? Should the rules of war change for them? If an enhanced human makes a deadly mistake, who’s to blame, her or the software/hardware people behind her? What becomes of them and their enhancements when they leave the army and rejoin civil society?

Prof. Lubell, a professor of international law at the University of Essex, research associate at the Hebrew University cybersecurity program and Swiss chair of humanitarian law at the Geneva Academy, is our guest on this episode of Lex Cybernetica, hosted by Ido Kenan.