|
A
peer-reviewed electronic journal published by the Institute for
Ethics and ISSN 1541-0099 23(1) – August 2013 |
Singularity Terrorism: Military Meta-Strategy
in Response to Terror and Technology
Woody Evans
Assistant Professor and
Librarian
Zayed University, Dubai,
UAE
Journal of Evolution and Technology - Vol. 23 Issue 1 – August 2013 - pgs 14-18
Abstract
This
paper examines the responses to advanced and transformative technologies in
military literature, attenuates the conclusions of earlier work suggesting that
there is an “ignorance of transhumanism” in the military, and updates the
current layout of transhuman concerns in military thought. The military is not
ignorant of transhuman issues and implications, though there was evidence for
this in the past; militaries and non-state actors (including terrorists)
increasingly use disruptive technologies with what we may call transhuman
provenance.
1.
Tight scopes
In
previous research, I found very little evidence of “transhuman terms” in
military literature (Evans 2007). The terms transhuman and posthuman
themselves appeared only 14 times in EBSCOhost’s Military &
Government Collection database. At the time, this database provided
“cover-to-cover full text for nearly 300 journals and periodicals and indexing
and abstracts for nearly 400 titles.” The number of titles now indexed by the
database is at 416, with an additional 288 other sources (speeches, reports, and
unclassified or declassified government documents). Though the earlier research
was tightly limited in scope, the lack of transhuman terms was nevertheless
striking in the mid-2000s. This is in itself interesting and revealing (see Evans
ibid. for full discussion).
Discussion
of transhumanism and its related terms (artificial intelligence, augmented
reality, and nanotechnology, for example) is more common in military sources
now. In the above mentioned database, the same terms (transhuman and
posthuman) appear as of Spring 2013 a total of 15 times (hey, it’s
progress!).
Web
results are also lacking.
For
example, a search for the term “transhuman” and variants (transhumanism,
transhumanist) on US military websites open to public view retrieves less than
100 results, including false-positives. “Posthuman” retrieves less than 30
results, after false-positives such as “off-post humans” and “contractor shall
post: human trafficking hotline” (from an old report documenting materiel clean
up in Colorado) are removed. Obviously the number of results changes over time,
as new documents go up and old documents are taken down on military servers.
Also, we can say nothing about the number of results on restricted military
sites, because we are not allowed to see them.
It
appears, then, that transhumanism remains a relatively minor concern in
military literature (at least the literature available to the public, both on
the open Web and in military-related periodicals); but the question of the role
of transhumanism in military concerns deserves more than a one-dimensional
investigation.
2.
The science-fiction condition
One
way into other dimensions of this investigation is the admission that military
literature is brimming with discussions of advanced technologies that we may
say have transhuman provenance; this is a way to express the idea that,
although the technologies discussed may not be explicitly labeled as “transhuman,”
they are certainly inspired and advanced by a cultural push toward the science-fiction
condition. As Warren Ellis put in a speech to the Improving Reality
conference:
We
are summoning [the future] into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the
room with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science Fiction Condition,
where we can see under atoms and across the world and across the methane lakes
of Titan... If I were sitting next to you twenty-five years ago, and you heard
a phone ring, and I took out a bar of glass and said, sorry, my phone just told
me it’s got new video of a solar flare, you’d have me sectioned in a flash.... Imagine
telling someone just twenty five years ago about GPS. This is the last
generation in the Western world that will ever be lost. LifeStraws. Synthetic
biology. Genetic sequencing. SARS was genetically sequenced within 48 hours of
its identification. I’m not even touching the Web, Wifi, mobile broadband,
cloud computing, electronic cigarettes… (Ellis 2012)
Technologies
such as real-time mapping, invisibility cloaks, augmented reality displays, and
other tools derived from advanced personal/wearable computers have, for a
generation now, been thoroughly grounded in the fictional tropes of cyberpunk,
biopunk, post-cyberpunk, and other sub-genres of science fiction. Ellis brings
home the point that we are completely surrounded by what would have been magic
just a few years ago. When young men and women on patrol in Kandahar don
advanced night vision gear, their cultural references for it are movies like The
Matrix and books like Virtual Light. When militaries talk
about invisibility cloaking in the 2010s or 2020s, they are talking about it
within the inescapable context of what was science fiction only a generation
ago. Take for example this passage from a 10 year old description of the EYEKON
system:
When
the soldier employs [a] weapon, he should see objects easily distinguishable as
friendly or not, as well as enemy locations. The Eyekon project is an
intelligent agent-based decision support system hosted on the soldier’s
wearable computer. Eyekon will use the soldier’s private network to provide a
perspective view in the weapon sight. This will naturally draw the warrior to
the most desirable target. (Hicks 2003)
And
how far have we come in a decade? The company behind EYEKON, 21st Century
Systems, Inc., continues to win Department of Defense contracts. The latest as
of this writing was a 2012 award of over $360,000 to develop a way to mine and
deliver actionable data to Army fleet logicians, and it won a number of
contracts since 2003 related to augmented reality, such as the Navy’s HiRSA
project (SBIR/STTR 2013). Technology moves on, and the military and its
contractors do not fall behind.
I
say that there is a “transhuman provenance” to these technologies, partly
because the science fiction of the last 30 years has been transhuman in its
concerns (Geraci 2011; Raulerson 2010; Fletcher 2012). The term “transhumanity”
dates to at least as early as 1978 in discussions of science fiction as a genre
(Prucher 2006).
Transhumanism
works now as an atmosphere in which the military understands and re-purposes
advanced technologies: technologies make warriors more lethal by making tools
more personal and useful. Accordingly, the evidence clearly points to an
increasingly transhuman military; consider the occurrence of such terms as
“augmented reality” in publicly viewable military websites alone. The term
occurs nearly 1900 times, representing nearly 20 times as many occurrences as
the term “transhuman” itself (excluding false-positives). To revisit that
EBSCOHost Military & Government Collection, in 2013, we find that the term
“artificial intelligence" occurs now 4,655 times. Biotechnology: 7,009
times. Nanotechnology: 2,070 times.
Clearly
the military is not “ignorant of transhuman concerns” just because they don’t
use the term “transhuman” very often.
3. Fighting in a transitional world
The
military as we know it today, however, began during earlier forms of social
organization, though it has not remained merely an artifact of the 1870s or of
the 1940s. As large traditional militaries struggle to adapt to today’s
non-state, asymmetrical, and networked targets, should we see the military’s
interest in technologies with transhuman provenance as evidence for its own
transition into organizations that can respond to posthuman post-states? How
will modern and future militaries become expressions of security in new kinds
of social governance that might exist in a posthuman world?
Terrorism
represents a threat to the traditional state, especially insofar as the
traditional state is associated with expansion of economic, cultural, or
geographical territories; as it was put (certainly as a warning) by Robert
Pape:
...
the close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of
suicide terrorist movements in the occupied regions should give pause to those
who favor solutions that involve conquering countries in order to transform
their political systems. (2003)
His
analysis of the “increasing tempo” of suicide bombings came during the ferment
of debate after the invasion of Iraq. Iraq is a fair example, as it was a
modern state before 2003. It is hardly a “traditional state” that exists within
the same geopolitical boundaries now – it
is simmering and sometimes boiling from within with factions, terrorism, and
counter-terrorism. Maybe we could call it a failing state, or a state failing
to thrive.
If
the military is an artifact of the state, then militaries must either co-opt or
defang the tactics and strategies of terrorists in order to protect the state
(and the military itself). Furthermore, if the military becomes an expression
of new kinds of security apparatuses in a post-traditional state world, then
terrorists plus transhumanism may provide a model for future
versions of the military in so far as terrorism represents decentralized,
highly-responsive / highly-aggressive, and networked cells rather than the
staid and dictatorial hierarchies of centralized authority. If the military can
co-opt such features while refraining from using the dark side of terrorists’
strategies (attacks on civilians, public utilities), terrorism may itself
be providing the models its enemies can use to destroy it.
It
is not enough just for the military establishment to be aware of transhumanism
and hope to use advanced technologies to disrupt terrorism to defend the state.
Militaries must take on transhumanism as a toolkit for understanding
geopolitical shifts – shifts which have
given a surprising amount of power to poor, technologically inferior, and “disorganized”
terror groups.
Transhumanism
has an affiliation with, maybe even roots in, the “cybertopian” visions of a
world interconnected with communications technologies for the common good. This
is a naive and perhaps dead view of reality, now, but one that nonetheless
informed the beliefs of many technologists who are now building the world we
live in. The decentralization of their vision is an actionable good that
militaries may take away in order to become the type of force needed to destroy
non-state terrorist groups. Transhumanism represents new ways for militaries
(and therefore states, if they are to survive) to understand the role of cheap,
ubiquitous, powerful, and weaponizable technology in the hands of the everyday
man. Transhumanism illustrates to militaries the power of distributed common
technology, yes, but more than that it carries an ethos that anyone could (even
if not everyone should) take up these tools for their own purposes.
I
once heard a squadron commander in the Air Force describe the essential
military mission as follows: “Our job is to kill people and break things.” That
is about as hard-boiled as you can get, I think. But in a posthuman future in
which militaries assume positions and attributes previously held by eggheads very
far from battlefields (transhumanists) and enemies willing to kill wantonly
(terrorists), perhaps the essential military mission itself becomes less about
Destroying the Things as it will be about Disrupting the Patterns. Every terror
attack causes the patterns of traditional state business to be gravely (and
potentially mortally) interrupted.
Can
the same strategies and tactics, coupled with radically empowering and
decentralized technologies, be put to use by militaries to similarly disrupt
the patterns of terrorists themselves?
Probably.
References
Ellis, W. 2012. How to see the future.
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314
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(June): 161-165.
http://www.jetpress.org/v16/evans.html
(accessed August 7, 2013).
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http://wakespace.lib.wfu.edu/bitstream/handle/10339/37249/Fletcher_wfu_0248M_10237.pdf
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