All Fronts
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All Fronts

Motherboard is militarizing our September theme week. Send us pitches for All Fronts.

Of all the immortalized Albert Einstein quotes, there is one about the future of military (de-)escalation and global warfare that can really suck the life out of a room:

"I do not know how the Third World War will be fought," Einstein reportedly said in an interview with Liberal Judaism's Alfred Werner, "but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks!"

Einstein said that in 1949, four years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it's a prediction that has only grown more potent in the twilight of the bomb, as technology has made it so that we're militarizing all of the things, from adaptive computer programs to virtual currencies.

That's why Motherboard is militarizing our upcoming theme week, which will run the third week of September. We're calling it All Fronts, and we are looking for smart, critical stories about how technology is driving military innovation and vice versa in 2015 and beyond.

Will autonomous weapons be the Kalashnikovs of the future? How are robots retracing the boundaries of the credo—"distance is your friend"—of military bomb squads around the world? Video games are being used for military training, simulations, and propaganda (the US Army has its own video game, as does Hezbollah; ISIS has two video games, a mod of Grand Theft Auto and a mod of Arma III) but how else are we militarizing cyberspace? How are we militarizing outer space? How are militaries treating the psychic wounds of remote combat now that wars are waged with joysticks round-the-clock over thousands of miles, bringing us closer to a perpetual state of war?

We want to hear the latest on networked battlefields, future soldiers, smart weapons, dumb weapons, drones, DARPA's blue-sky research, and… What else? And to Einstein's point, with what weapons will World War III (or IV!) be fought?

You tell us: Send pitches to your favorite Motherboard editor or to our general editor email at editor@motherboard.tv. Feel free to drop me a line at brian@motherboard.tv as well. All Fronts will run September 14 - 18.