Barbara Ehrenreich: The Fog of (Robot) War

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:




War Without Humans
Modern Blood Rites Revisited

By Barbara Ehrenreich


For a book about the all-too-human “passions of war,” my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon -- honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth -- it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate “wars” that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement.

More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation. In the human case, we know it is capable of spreading geographically and evolving rapidly over time -- qualities that, as I suggested somewhat fancifully, make war a metaphorical successor to the predatory animals that shaped humans into fighters in the first place.

A decade and a half later, these musings do not seem quite so airy and abstract anymore. The trend, at the close of the twentieth century, still seemed to be one of ever more massive human involvement in war -- from armies containing tens of thousands in the sixteenth century, to hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth, and eventually millions in the twentieth century world wars.

It was the ascending scale of war that originally called forth the existence of the nation-state as an administrative unit capable of maintaining mass armies and the infrastructure -- for taxation, weapons manufacture, transport, etc. -- that they require. War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake. But it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175415/tomgram%3A_barbara_ehrenreich%2C_the_fog_of_%28robot%29_war/ (the story follows a brief intro)

[ensho]

1. kick

nt

[Uncle Joe]

2. The conclusion of this analysis by the author ends on a hopeful note, however

I believe the non-listed vices to initiate war ie; greed, fear, envy, hatred, lust for power will outlast her listed indispensable qualities to wage it and in the ultimate of automated worlds once the switch is flipped, turning it off may become impossible.

My conclusion is that war can never evolve to solve itself, only the evolution of International Peace can do that.

War Without Humans

Once set in place, the cyber-automation of war is hard to stop. Humans will cling to their place “in the loop” as long as they can, no doubt insisting that the highest level of decision-making -- whether to go to war and with whom -- be reserved for human leaders. But it is precisely at the highest levels that decision-making may most need automating. A head of state faces a blizzard of factors to consider, everything from historical analogies and satellite-derived intelligence to assessments of the readiness of potential allies. Furthermore, as the enemy automates its military, or in the case of a non-state actor, simply adapts to our level of automation, the window of time for effective responses will grow steadily narrower. Why not turn to a high-speed computer? It is certainly hard to imagine a piece of intelligent hardware deciding to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading Iraq.

(snip)

Even patriarchy cannot depend on war for its long-term survival, since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, at least within U.S. forces, established women’s worth as warriors. Over the centuries, human qualities once deemed indispensable to war fighting -- muscular power, manliness, intelligence, judgment -- have one by one become obsolete or been ceded to machines.

(snip)


And in that may lie our last hope. With the decline of mass militaries and their possible replacement by machines, we may finally see that war is not just an extension of our needs and passions, however base or noble. Nor is it likely to be even a useful test of our courage, fitness, or national unity. War has its own dynamic or -- in case that sounds too anthropomorphic -- its own grim algorithms to work out. As it comes to need us less, maybe we will finally see that we don’t need it either. We can leave it to the ants.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[infidel dog]

3. I'd like to think she is right, however...

as I get older I tend to agree more and more with George Carlin. Humanity went wrong a very long time ago and shows little evidence of improvement. I think our love of war is biological. We love violence. We really enjoy it. We fantasize about it, engage in artificial electronic scenarios involving it, and really dig inflicting it on each other, even our immediate families. Homo Sapiens(hoo boy, talk about your misnomers already)is pretty f***ed up, a bunch of bloodthirsty hypercephalic chimpanzees. I hope that somehow we can evolve beyond violence, becoming more bonobo than chimp, if you will, but I wouldn't bet on it, even if I had the extra cash and a million years or so to watch things happen.