Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it.

Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons.

The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day.

Yuval Shani is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics and AI Institute.

He also served on the UN Human Rights Committee, where he first encountered the legal and ethical

challenges posed

by autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on the intersection of international humanitarian

law, human rights, and emerging military technologies. In this episode, Yuval joins Matt Merrill for a

wide-ranging conversation. They cover topics including how close we are to fully autonomous lethal weapons,

the accountability gap that AI-mediated warfare creates, and what lessons software engineers can draw from these challenges when building consequential AI systems of any kind.

Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and

scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations.

His background is in back-end development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design.

He currently architects and delivers software products

and leads a team of engineers at Dept Agency.

You can learn more about his work at code.com.

Theothermatem.com. I am here with Yuval Shani, who is a legal scholar for autonomous weapon systems, among other things.

And we are here to talk about autonomous weapon systems.

And before I go too much further, Yuval,

could you introduce yourself?

Sure.

First, thanks for having me.

...