lareviewofbooks | The past two decades have brought two interrelated and disturbing
developments in the technopolitics of US militarism. The first is the
fallacious claim for precision and accuracy in the United States’s
counterterrorism program, particularly for targeted assassinations. The
second is growing investment in the further automation of these same
operations, as exemplified by US Department of Defense Algorithmic
Warfare Cross-Functional Team, more commonly known as Project Maven.
Artificial intelligence is now widely assumed to be something, some thing,
of great power and inevitability. Much of my work is devoted to trying
to demystify the signifier of AI, which is actually a cover term for a
range of technologies and techniques of data processing and analysis,
based on the adjustment of relevant parameters according to either
internally or externally generated feedback
Some take AI developers’ admission that so-called “deep-learning”
algorithms are beyond human understanding to mean that there are now
forms of intelligence superior to the human. But an alternative
explanation is that these algorithms are in fact elaborations of pattern
analysis that are not based on significance (or learning) in the human
sense, but rather on computationally detectable correlations
that, however meaningless, eventually produce results that are again
legible to humans. From training data to the assessment of results, it
is humans who inform the input and evaluate the output of the
algorithmic system’s operations.
When we hear calls for greater military investments in AI, we should
remember that the United States is the overwhelmingly dominant global
military power. The US “defense” budget, now over $700 billion, exceeds
that of the next eight most heavily armed countries in the world
combined (including both China and Russia). The US maintains nearly 800
military bases around the world, in seventy countries. And yet a
discourse of US vulnerability continues, not only in the form of the
so-called war on terror, but also more recently in the form of a new arms race among the US, China and Russia, focused on artificial intelligence.
The problem for which algorithmic warfare is the imagined solution
was described in the early 19th century by Prussian military theorist
Carl von Clausewitz, and subsequently became known as the “fog of war.”
That phrase gained wider popular recognition as the title of director
Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary about the life and times of former US
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. In the film, McNamara reflects on the
chaos of US operations in Vietnam. The chaos made one thing clear:
reliance on uniforms that signal the difference between “us” and “them”
marked the limits of the logics of modern warfighting, as well as of
efforts to limit war’s injuries.
