AI innovation drives warfare – there is a unique correlation between machine intelligence and the capacity of war.

What is important for the purposes of this article is that Wiener was able to demonstrate that very simple feedback mechanisms could produce complex emergent results or what ‘appeared’ like intelligence even if the machines were not conscious of that intelligence. What I explore throughout the rest of the section is how even small advances in machine intelligence could produce dramatic changes in what we think of now as human dependent drones. Already AI platforms have the capacity to strategize and win complex games like Go, AI via drones have the capability to target or execute operations on their own, robots can 3D print and construct other robots, that is, a simple form of reproduction. The only thing missing is what in philosophical terms we call will or desire. However, the insight from Wiener is that the difference between rudimentary will and a command code is insignificant in effect if a feedback exists between the machine and the external environment which can shape or direct the now desiring machine. To put it somewhat simply, we do not need human general intelligence for robots to change the world and geopolitics; the world could change overnight if mechanical life emerged or was released into the wild and was as sophisticated, resilient and procreative as the cockroach. We are already experiencing the burgeoning capability of cunning machine. If one considers to the underlying political and economic pressure to move away from human combatants not unlike the globalization of the labor market more broadly, the incentives for innovations continuing are difficult to deny.47 Even before 9/11 combat was becoming too costly in both economic and political terms and therefore required an alternative in order for empires and smaller states to stay afloat in lean times. The globally modeled War on Terrorism brought the crises of military expenditure still lingering after the Cold War to a head. However, the drive to cut costs and political liability has not stopped at the battlefield. Attempts to remove humans further and further from the battlefield follows this inhuman trajectory into the arena of decision-making and contestation.48 The reliance on algorithmic warfare creates the opportunity for increasingly unilateral warmaking. Cunning machines, not machines of reason but machines capable of hunting and trapping, represent the possibility of the command and control developed for nuclear arsenals with the micro-scale to pursue and kill of assassins or special forces.49 This process of automating politics as well as war creates further incentive for the development of increasingly autonomous machines and actually undermines security as it makes the capacity to wage war cheaper and more accessible around the planet. The drive for more autonomous machines is heading toward ‘sustainable warfare’, a kind of weird parallel to sustainable development. Like sustainable development, sustainable warfare really makes warfare endemic rather than providing a real alternative to war making. So war as we know it may be coming to an end but a permeating martial transformation is just getting started. As the transformation in domestic policing, military planning, and combat takes place, the tactical landscape will also mutate, amplifying the corrosive effects on politics. A security complex indifferent to the differences between the war and policing, battlefield and lifeworld will increasingly target Internet exchanges, servers, monitoring, and listening stations, civilian communication and media infrastructure. As populations cease to matter to states, either those attacking or being attacked, infrastructure becomes the whole of the strategic landscape. Also, as the size of autonomous machines shrink, the incentive for hacking or indiscriminate attacks such as electromagnetic pulse attacks will become more desirable as drone to drone or human to drone combat will be prohibitively difficult. After all, how reliably can one expect to track a drone the size of a dragonfly or as low to the ground as a snake? Thus, we face the possibility of a confluence of unaccountable decision-making, even the absence of human decisions at all with the saturation of living spaces with the dissonance of combat, killing and destruction. Rather than simply automating the ‘hunt’ for enemies chosen by political processes, already reliance on things like signature strikes signal a shift to the automation of the political decision of who is and is not an enemy in the first place. This shift from what Human Rights Watch has termed ‘human on the loop’ practices to ‘human out of the loop’ practices pushes the posthuman character of war further into the nightmare zone in which everything is an object to be targeted but never encountered or recognized. An algorithmic cunning replaces enmity and martial judgment in the recognizable terms. Furthermore, in a future with a receding human public and that states are indifferent to moral catastrophe, these changes in machine capability and autonomy as well as the deployment of such machines would not be political events. Switches would be flipped by military planners or software developers along technical rather than ethical or political lines. Lewis Mumford referred to this as the advent of ‘post-historic’ humanity in which a process that ‘began innocently by eliminating fallible human impulses from science will end by eliminating human nature from the whole world of reality. In posthistoric culture life itself is reduced to predictable, mechanically conditioned and controlled motion, with ever incalculable – that is, every creative – element removed’.51 I would add that what emerges in its place is a mechanic creativity allowed to thrive within the constraints of a limited martial logic. If we continue on this trajectory practicality could replace both strategic and moral thinking.52 Further, the fora in which such decisions will be made (if at all) are likely to be constricted as secrecy predominates in an environment charged by a dangerous mix of paranoia and real danger.