A.I., Iran, & Automated War with Prof. Toby Walsh
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 ⢠905 Ratings
šļø 2 March 2026
ā±ļø 91 minutes
šļø Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and a lot of dangerous ideas floating around at the moment. Iran being the biggest of them. A lot of people asking me what I think about the American and Israeli strike on Iran. Most of the coverage and analysis seems to be, look, |
| 0:23.7 | he was a bad guy, Hamanae, and the regime was terrible, but this is illegal, and so, and we don't |
| 0:30.6 | know what is going to come of it. And I think I just broadly agree with that rather boring and |
| 0:36.2 | banal interpretation, unfortunately. |
| 0:38.7 | If, you know, the Iranian people are a fabulous culture and an amazing people and incredibly |
| 0:45.8 | industrious and innovative and culturally self-aware and sophisticated. |
| 0:49.3 | And so I've long felt that they've been imprisoned for the past nearly four decades under crazy, you know, |
| 0:56.5 | dictatorial, theocratic idiots, jihadist, death cultists who just want the worst for |
| 1:03.9 | Western civilization and for Jews and women and, you know, the list goes on. So on a narrow |
| 1:10.7 | level was a little part of me happy when |
| 1:12.9 | Chaminet was reported dead? Absolutely. And I sort of admire the gumption of finally trying |
| 1:19.6 | to do something about the situation. But it's clear that there is no rationale either under |
| 1:25.3 | international law or under American law for doing this. Iran posed no threat, |
| 1:30.5 | in fact, the very fact that it was so unthreatening at the moment because it had been so |
| 1:33.6 | successfully degraded in the strikes in the middle of last year against its nuclear facilities |
| 1:38.5 | and so thoroughly degraded by a succession of incredible Israeli security operations like the |
| 1:43.7 | exploding pages on |
| 1:45.0 | Hezbollah in Lebanon and targeted assassinations in Iran. That's why it made this such a low-cost |
| 1:53.0 | and achievable outcome for the Americans and the Israelis. So the very grounds on which one might |
| 2:00.1 | want to base a rationale for a preemptive war, namely that your adversary is formidable under an imminent threat are the very reason why this undertaking was taken now. I mean, the fact that those conditions were not met. It's not just legalistic, persnickety nonsense to care about international law and American law. |
| 2:20.4 | These are the, you know, international law, perhaps one can make an argument is easier to ignore, |
| 2:27.5 | since even the Iraq war was in contravention of international law. |
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