Drone Warfare in Ukraine with Simon Shuster

Simon Shuster is a journalist who has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over fifteen years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for Time magazine. He was born in Moscow, and he and his family came to The United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was six years old. After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for the Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, and other publications. His political coverage of Russia's descent into authoritarianism included numerous profiles of Vladimir Putin and interviews with top Russian officials. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine. Simon has spent years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. The year after the annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country. Simon is the author of the 2024 book, The Showman, Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. And he recently wrote the Time Magazine article, How Ukraine Gamified Drone Warfare. He is currently at work on a new book that examines the future of warfare and how the lessons and technologies that emerged from the war in Ukraine are changing warfare and security around the world. Simon joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss drone warfare, AI assisted targeting, the gamification of drone combat, the rapid iteration cycle of drone innovation, new ethical dilemmas in warfare, the coming proliferation of war drones, and the shifting balance of global power. Kevin Ball or Kate Ball is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He cofounded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI in action discussion group through Latent Space. Check out the show notes to follow Kay Ball on Twitter or LinkedIn, or visit his website, kayball.llc. Hello, and welcome to this episode of Software Engineering Daily. I'm K Bal. I'm your host today, and it is my extreme honor to bring a somewhat unusual for our topic area guest on. Let me introduce senior time correspondent, Simon Shister. Thank you. Really great to join you for for this conversation. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. I am very excited. So let's maybe start with a little bit of of your background and what you've been deep diving in for the last, I don't know, how many years. Yeah. For most of my career, which is about two decades now, I've been reporting on primarily on Russia and Ukraine. Covered the war in Ukraine since it began way back in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimean region. And, basically, throughout, I've I've focused on it, you know, interviewing military commanders, presidents of Ukraine, people on the Russian side. And the last three and a half years or so since the full scale invasion …