DEV Community: Avi Perera

Autonomous Weapons Are Not the Moral Choice

Avi Perera — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:35:36 +0000

Thomas X. Hammes wants the case for autonomous weapons to sound obvious: cheaper, safer for troops, inevitable, so build them and field them as fast as possible. I have spent enough time around the CCW process in Geneva to know why every part of that argument needs unpacking before anyone treats it as settled. In November 2023, the Atlantic Council published a piece by Hammes…

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Originally published at Autonomous Weapons Are Not the Moral Choice

The Governance Gap: UN’s 2026 Science and Technology Report

Avi Perera — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:27:46 +0000

Every July, a fairly unglamorous document lands on the desks of UN Member State delegations. It has none of the drama of a Security Council resolution or the visibility of a climate summit. It is simply titled Current developments in science and technology and their potential impact on international security and disarmament efforts, and this year’s edition, A/81/246, released on 21 July 2026…

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Originally published at The Governance Gap: UN’s 2026 Science and Technology Report

The Wonderful World of Context

Avi Perera — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:04:46 +0000

First of all, I don’t think you’ll find many people who would say everyone is literally equal in every regard. Usually, when people say all races are equal, they’re talking about the possible range of potentialities, rather than meaning to be completely literal. I have read and heard far too many racist statements and comments from ignorant people along the lines of: A. “On average…

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Originally published at The Wonderful World of Context

WAIC 2026: Shanghai’s Agentic AI Safety Forum

Avi Perera — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 04:58:08 +0000

A field analysis of Concordia AI’s Frontier and Agentic AI Safety Forum in Shanghai, and what it should mean for anyone tracking the parallel debate over meaningful human control in autonomous weapons. Between 17-20th July 2026, the Beijing-based AI safety organisation Concordia AI convened the Frontier and Agentic AI Safety Forum as an official part of the World AI Conference (WAIC) in…

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Originally published at WAIC 2026: Shanghai’s Agentic AI Safety Forum

The New Colonisers: How the Digital Nomad Economy Is Recolonising the Global South

Avi Perera — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 20:46:41 +0000

Usually I don’t watch much YouTube these days, and I’m highly cautious and skeptical of what I do watch online. However this video by Moon called “Bali: Everything Wrong With Society” came into my recommended and after watching it, combined with my knowledge of living in South East Asia for some years, leads me to agree very much with many of the points he is making. I highly recommend for…

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Originally published at The New Colonisers: How the Digital Nomad Economy Is Recolonising the Global South

Four Objectives, Zero Wins: Mearsheimer’s Reckoning With America’s Iran War

Avi Perera — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:46:32 +0000

A close read of John Mearsheimer’s 28 July 2026 appearance on Judging Freedom, and what it tells us about the limits of coercive bargaining, alliance management, and the cost of broken commitments. On 28 July 2026, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer sat down with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom to deliver what has become a recurring verdict on this administration’s Iran…

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Originally published at Four Objectives, Zero Wins: Mearsheimer’s Reckoning With America’s Iran War

When Algorithms Go to War: Inside the New Military-AI-Industrial Complex

Avi Perera — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:22:24 +0000

I first encountered this research not on the page, but in a meeting room. Earlier this year, in the margins of one of the CCW-adjacent side events that now cluster around every Group of Governmental Experts session on lethal autonomous weapons, I heard Frank Slijper — who leads the Arms Trade programme at the Dutch peace organisation PAX — lay out, in characteristically understated terms…

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Originally published at When Algorithms Go to War: Inside the New Military-AI-Industrial Complex

PredPol (Geolitica)

Avi Perera — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 03:32:21 +0000

Lead Paragraph: PredPol (recently rebranded as Geolitica before ceasing operations) was a predictive policing algorithm designed to forecast the time and location of future crimes, effectively serving as an algorithmic targeting system for domestic law enforcement. By transposing mathematical models of earthquake aftershocks onto human behaviour, the system operationalised systemic bias…

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Originally published at PredPol (Geolitica)

The Algorithm’s Kill Chain: The Future of Military AI

Avi Perera — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:41:28 +0000

In our daily lives, artificial intelligence has become a tool for the mundane—an LLM to help polish an email or a predictive algorithm to curate a playlist. But as world leaders and experts gathered in Geneva for the June 2026 Informal Exchange on AI in the Military Domain, a much darker narrative emerged. The 2026 AWS Diplomacy Report describes a world of “accelerated warfare” where the window…

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Originally published at The Algorithm’s Kill Chain: The Future of Military AI

Schema Sovereignty & AI Citations: Death of Blue Links

Avi Perera — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:54:16 +0000

In the digital ecosystem of 2026, the “first page” is no longer a destination—it is a survival requirement. According to the latest data from Search Engine Journal, less than 1% of searchers ever venture onto the second or third pages of results. But even page-one visibility has fundamentally changed. “Ranking” is no longer about securing a spot among the ten blue links; it is about winning the…

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Originally published at Schema Sovereignty & AI Citations: Death of Blue Links

Parallelism Over Pixels: Why the Encoder-Free 12B and DiffusionGemma are Rebuilding the Developer Stack

Avi Perera — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:42:56 +0000

This is Why Your AI Workflow is About to Feel “Slow” For the past year, the industry has grown accustomed to the rhythmic, token-by-token “typing” of large language models. While impressive, this sequential generation is a fundamental architectural bottleneck. Standard autoregressive models generate one word at a time from left to right, a process that frequently leaves local hardware—like…

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Originally published at Parallelism Over Pixels: Why the Encoder-Free 12B and DiffusionGemma are Rebuilding the Developer Stack

Disarmament: Nuclear Risks, Youth & AI in Warfare

Avi Perera — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:38:34 +0000

Hello friends, I just wrapped up Session 6 of the Disarmament Toolkit 2025 with the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific (UNRCPD), and I’m still buzzing. Three hours with practitioners, diplomats, scholars, and youth leaders from across the world will do that to you, especially when the conversation ranges from nuclear risk and treaty erosion to gender, climate…

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Originally published at Disarmament: Nuclear Risks, Youth & AI in Warfare