Even the oligarchs of the artificial intelligence industries are warning that their creations have the capacity for the ultimate destruction of the planet and its population. ANDREW MURRAY suggests that there might just be other solutions
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Senior bombing rooms: arms companies funding British universities
TOM SYKES examines the ever-expanding military-industrial-academic complex
Glasgow University currently holds £3m in BAE, Boeing (maker of Apache helicopters for such triumphs as the Iraq and Afghan wars) and Airbus (favoured customers: Saudi Arabia and US Customs and Border Protection)
The Labour government must deliver on its commitment to bring back privatised services into the public sector. This not only saves money but also creates accountability and generates wider social benefits, argues ANDY MCDONALD MP
PCS is demanding the long-overdue return of essential services to public ownership, explains FRAN HEATHCOTE
Despite promises of a new era of insourcing, billions of pounds of public contracts continue to flow to private firms. Unions are now calling for urgent action to bring services back in-house, says EDDIE DEMPSEY
Public ownership of Great British Railways has enormous potential to improve our railway network, but that can’t happen unless jobs, employee rights and union recognition is at the heart of the transition, argues MARYAM ESLAMDOUST
If Labour is genuinely committed to supporting working-class students it must act urgently to reverse the funding crisis affecting universities and colleges, JO GRADY tells Christophe Domec
Challenges from the unscrupulous misuse of AI to steal actors’ voice and physical likenesses is being met with a firm union response, writes LYNDA ROOKE
SINCE the murders of George Floyd and Sarah Everard, British universities have been keen to signal their support for equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI).
Slammed by 300 academics and students in an open letter last year to Gavin Williamson as “tokenistic,” such woke posturing is also hypocritical given higher education’s growing financial relationships with arms manufacturers such as BAE Systems, Boeing, Airbus and Qinetiq, which directly enable regimes across the world to persecute women and children, and ethnic, religious and sexual minorities.
As scientific research cash from the EU dries up post-Brexit and the government pledges to halve its funding for HE arts subjects, universities will court anyone who can grease their palms — and ethics seldom comes into the equation.
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The evolution of the Scottish nationalist leadership into cheerleaders for Nato has led the party to betray its pledges on Palestine and social spending, writes COLL McCAIL
The Defence Universities Alliance is a bit to co-opt higher education into the wider drive to war — we should resist as earlier generations of scientists did, argue say ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT of SCIENCE AND SOCIETY
