The Autonomous Singularity

Once we go all-robot, what is the point of war? How is it really altered in terms of outcomes sought?

We are all reading a lot lately about how AI is going to take over the battlefield and prove to be decisive in its applications of unmanned power application and projection. While I am definitely a believer in the many, the cheap, the unmanned, and the disposable replacing the few, the expensive, the manned, and the can’t-be-lost, I can’t help but feel like we’re mentally careening between any number of throughlines that will steer these developments to a sort of conflict dead-end (not exactly world peace but harding a world of chaos).

The first is the high likelihood that all of these revolutionary developments won’t practically prove to be as decisive as everyone thinks, primarily because of nuclear weapons retaining their Leviathan-like status as the we-all-know-where-this-ends-up punchline for any major conflict scenario. Now, we are already being inundated with arguments that suggest one side can win a “war” (a word that grows more nebulous with time) by truly disabling the other side and then achieving its goals at — literally — hypersonic speed.

So let’s toy with that one, using an example involving two nuclear powers.