War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) is a book by

history of warfare and the history of technology.[1]

It is influenced in part by

definition of philosophy as a "tool box" that was to encourage thinking about new ideas. They prepared the field for a re-appropriation of their concepts, for use in another context of the "same" concept, which they called "actualization
". DeLanda drew on the concepts these authors put forth, to investigate the history of warfare and technology.

A social history of technology and of warfare

DeLanda describes how social and economic formations influence war machines, i.e. the form of

emergent properties are displayed and claims that the "mecanosphere", constituted by the machinic phylum, possesses similar qualities. He argues for example how a certain level of population growth may induce invasions
and others may provoke wars.

As a historian, DeLanda is indebted to the

nomads, because of a lack of political control. DeLanda writes:[2]

I defined the machinic phylum as the set of all the singularities at the onset of processes of self-organization — the critical points in the flow of matter and energy, points at which these flows spontaneously acquire a new form or pattern. All these processes, involving elements as different as molecules, cells or termites, may be represented by a few mathematical models. Thus, because one and the same singularity may be said to trigger two very different self-organizing effects, the singularity is said to be 'mechanism independent'

Centralization and decentralization

According to DeLanda, centralization and decentralization are two trends in the "war machine": either military commanders try to

control, command and communication
center (C3), which is the case in centralized armies, decentralized war machines allow it to disperse at each level of the machine.

The 1805

massive parallelism
.

According to DeLanda, the Prussian Army was thus

hackers' re-appropriation of the military ARPANET in the early ages of the Internet
.

Thus, the

unicausality or determinism
).

Wargaming and game theory

DeLanda also shows how

military-industrial complex. Frederick the Great was fascinated with automatons, as Foucault has shown and with miniature wargames. 19th century wargaming models, which benefited from progress in cartography, was dependent on dice at the beginning to represent the effects of chaos. Eventually, these irrational conditions were taken out of the loop, as well as human will: current military wargames oppose computers, not human beings. It was shown during the nuclear arms race
that human beings refused in game models to cross the threshold and press the red button, which convinced military programmers to take out human players.

DeLanda distinguishes various "ages" of war machines (although they probably don't succeed each other in a simple way; Foucault and Deleuze likewise cast in doubt such historical linear succession); he also defines various "levels" of war machines (tactics, strategy and logistics, which necessarily involve politics).

Henceforth, describing the passage from the "clockwork paradigm" to the "motor paradigm", he quotes Michel Serres's studies to demonstrate how this new paradigm led to the creation of an "abstract motor" composed of three components: a reservoir (steam in the case of the steam engine), a form of exploitable difference (heat/cold) and a "diagram" or "program" for the exploitation of (thermal) differences. Michel Serres thus mentioned Darwin, Marx and Freud as examples in the area of scientific discourse,

reservoirs of population, of capital or of unconscious desires, put to work by the use of differences of fitness, class or sex, each following a procedure directing the circulation of naturally selected species, or commodities and labor, or symptoms and fantasies....|Serres (p.141)

Thus,

tinkering and can thus not be said to be the consequences of a "paradigm shift" as Thomas Kuhn would conceive it. There is no necessary pre-eminence of science over technology (nor the reverse). De Landa thus explains that the "abstract motor" is more important than the "concrete motor", taking as his example the dazzling victories during the Napoleonic Wars
,

Napoleon himself did not incorporate the motor as a technical object into his war machine (as mentioned, he explicitly rejected the use of

nations
.|De Landa (p.141)

Napoleon's true innovation was not in the implementation of the motor invention — he rejected the use of steamboats — but his use of the pool of energy formed by

desertions
if they allowed small groups of soldiers to take over specific missions.

DeLanda also notes how

Turing machines
were also perfect "abstract machines" which would be implemented in concrete machines only later.

See also

References

  1. ISSN 0096-3402
    .
  2. ^ DeLanda, p. 132

Sources

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=War_in_the_Age_of_Intelligent_Machines&oldid=1220082004"