The announcement itself is undeniably dystopian. Last November, the American DARPA (who else?) announced that it had successfully conducted a live-fire exercise of collaborative robotic weapons—airborne, ground and maritime—without real-time human intervention. In tech jargon, this “no real-time human intervention” is called high autonomy and deep interconnection of robotic weapons; in more aggressive parlance these “cooperating drones” are called a swarm…
What is it about? Every self-respecting techno-force knows that these high-tech weapons will encounter (in real-world use) electronic countermeasures from the adversary. Consequently, the successful DARPA exercise focused on the effective operation of drones even if they lose “contact” with their human operators; even if they lose their position fix (via GPS); even if… The success of the exercise lies in the fact that, despite this partial “technological handicap,” the drones’ programming allowed them to keep exchanging data and information among themselves, to “make collective tactical decisions,” and to “cooperate in a dynamic and hostile environment with minimal intercommunication.”
In other words: the war machines “self-organize effectively” because they “are intelligent.” This was proudly stated by DARPA, and we have no reason to dispute it since similar research (sometimes with charming demonstrations…) is also being conducted by other top-tier armies of the capitalist world.
Our concern here, however, is not what kind of high-tech wars we will suffer in the (unfortunately not-so-distant) future. Rather, it is what the bitter conclusion will be when the “self-organization of machines” proves to be more effective than our own human self-organization.
In these times the pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-existential stuttering of the “return to nature” kind, are not justifiable…