Description
AI-enabled decision-support tools are likely an unavoidable part of states’ future resort-to-force decision-making, due to their superior capacity to absorb data and deliver outputs at speeds unimaginable for humans. Algorithmic reason promises more precise knowledge and more efficient decision-making. However, AI-enabled vision sustains both information and visual exposure and opacity. To this end, machine learning algorithms are often called black boxes even as they are in practice reconfiguring how decisions come to be at the intersection of humans and machines. While many cite greater algorithmic transparency as an urgent need, I argue that this overlooks the ways in which algorithmic reason conceals through practices of in-visibility, anonymity, and fragmentation. These practices already define US-driven war-making today, and with the addition of AI to all levels of war, technological authoritarianism presents a clear risk to democratic norms, which require multiplicity and struggle. In arguing for a re-centring of humans in war, we are confronted with an entrenched algorithmic reason which permeates not just war but all aspects of society.
