Artificial (In)Security and the EU: The Politics of AI, Technoscience, and Buzzwords

Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), their research and development (R&D), applications and uses in security and defence in the European context have been recently surrounded by a constellation of hyped and stereotyped idioms such as ‘disruptive technologies’, ‘arms race’, ‘defence sovereignty’, and ‘technological supremacy’. Buzzwords related to AI innovation are equally omnipresent and strategically performed, circulated, and enacted for lay publics by European Union (EU) policy makers and practitioners, member states, defence companies, high-tech developers, and communities of science and security experts. Despite their latest proliferation, these catchwords have attracted little scholarly attention, given their role as performative linguistic technologies that engender the emergence of normalized meanings and (non)knowledges around AI in security and defence. In this regard, the research will consider the concept of technoscience to pay more attention to and critically engage with emerging technologies such as AI to address knowledge issues and the politics of technoscientific objects as explicitly value and interest-laden, engaged in an ongoing process of validation, valuation, and contestation. The paper will examine the mechanisms of knowledge production regarding AI and the asymmetries between those in charge of ‘writing’ the dominant and often glorified framings that legitimize the development and use of this technology in security and war-making. How are hyped expert and collective visions of AI (in)security negotiated, (re)imagined, and enacted in the EU? What do they perform, reveal, or conceal for the AI’s ‘meaning in the making’ in the areas of security and defence? The aim of this paper is to explore if and how the cloud of buzzwords shapes the AI technoscientific security landscape in Europe, and whether it influences the EU’s research and development priorities in line with a security and defence-driven technological innovation model that helps rationalize the technology in progressive or dystopic terms.