Dadich: I want to center our conversation on artificial intelligence, which has gone from science fiction to a reality that’s changing our lives. When was the moment you knew that the age of real AI was upon us?

Obama: My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture.

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Dadich: I understand you’re a Star Trek fan. That was a show inspired by a utopian view of technology—what about it shaped your vision of the future?

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Obama: Star Trek, like any good story, says that we’re all complicated, and we’ve all got a little bit of Spock and a little bit of Kirk [laughs] and a little bit of Scotty, maybe some Klingon in us, right?

What I will say, though, is that the critique of drones has been important, because it has ensured that you don’t have this institutional comfort and inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of enemies. I will say that what prompted a lot of the internal reforms we put in place had less to do with what the left or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International or other organizations were saying and had more to do with me looking at sort of the way in which the number of drone strikes was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this. And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.

The president is due to consult his principal national security officials in October on which, if any, of the options are still feasible in the time left before he leaves office.

Some more radical options, like changing the US nuclear posture to rule out first use of nuclear arms in a conflict and taking some of the nation’s intercontinental ballistic missiles off hair-trigger alert, have faced such strong opposition from allies abroad and the Pentagon that they are no longer being seriously considered.

First, the government’s very use of the term “non-combatant,” rather than “civilian,” in reporting its numbers exposes one of its most dangerous and far-reaching premises: that even “outside areas of active hostilities,” it need only apply the looser, law-of-war standards that govern conduct in war, rather than the more protective rules that apply under international human rights law. In short, the government continues to insist — unlike virtually every other nation on Earth — that even outside of a war zone, it is still at war.

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Second, the statistics released by the government today — specifically, that it has killed between 64 and 116 “non-combatants” in lethal-force strikes between January 20, 2009 and December 31, 2015 — are dramatically lower than those documented by independent journalists and human rights groups. Those groups’ estimates have ranged from 200 to 1000 civilians killed during President Obama’s two terms.

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The government claims that it has taken into account credible reports of civilian deaths from such groups, but its explanation for the vast discrepancy — that it has “information that is generally unavailable to non-governmental organizations” — boils down to “trust us.”

As President, Eisenhower remained mute on Hiroshima. He oversaw a rapid expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which grew from around twelve hundred warheads when he took office, in 1953, to more than twenty-two thousand when he left, in 1961—from the equivalent of five thousand Hiroshima bombs to the equivalent of more than a million at its height. Eisenhower, in other words, is an unlikely hero for opponents of nuclear weapons. After he left the Presidency, however, he made more critical statements on the bombings. In “Mandate for Change,” published in 1963, he wrote that, during the alleged meeting with Stimson, he had “been conscious of a feeling of depression,” and claimed that he had told the Secretary of War that “the dropping of the bomb was completely unnecessary.” In an interview with Newsweek from later that year, Eisenhower stated bluntly that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”