Leo Szilard Lectureship Award: How Scientists and Engineers Can Help Shape Technologies for a Safer, More Peaceful Future

We live in an increasingly dangerous world marked by the abandonment of hard-won arms-control and nonproliferation agreements, the modernization at a cost of trillions of dollars of existing nuclear arsenals, threats to use nuclear weapons, and the introduction of autonomous weapons systems. Advances in science and technology play an important role in enabling and sometimes driving some of these developments, but technologies can also be shaped such that their military use becomes difficult or even impractical. This talk highlights some current examples from the areas of advanced nuclear energy, robotics, and AI, where contributions from scientists and engineers can be particularly valuable and timely in advancing efforts to prevent the military use of some key technologies currently under development.