• Contribute
• What's New
• Submit News

8.4

Author: Manuel DeLanda Excerpt: In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology has become chillingly apparent. For Manuel De Landa, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications; he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. The recent emergence of intelligence and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capbilities is, for De Landa, part of a much larger transfer of cognitive strucutures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century. .: Buy at Amazon.com :. .: Buy at Amazon.co.uk :.

DeLanda's book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines was perhaps one of the most loosely titled books I've read. After its very interesting introduction, the book goes on a 120-130 page look into the history of war - more specifically, the history of the conodial bullet, tactics, fortifications and communications. Only then is the subjects of computer even introduced into the book. Yet, even after this introduction, much of the remainder of the book is spent dealing with issues outside of the AI applications in the military.

I cannot say that I did not enjoy this book, nor can I say I had a hard time putting it down. The book was a lot more on the history of war, with computer applications naturally weaving into the discussion at hand. No specific AI systems were covered in depth at all, no explanation of the techniques or hardware used in programs, and only very superficial coverings of such subjects as machine vision and expert systems.

Despite all of this, once you have read through the historical part of the book, DeLanda has some very interesting ideas and theories of war and computer models. I must admit that not all of the history bored me. I was completely unaware of how closely tied the military and early computer development had been. In fact, most of the early uses of computer were exclusively for military means, starting with the 'gun director'. The gun director was an early computer used to predict the position of an aircraft and help the gun operator aim. From there, DeLanda shows how the military used computers to either slowly phase out humans from the 'control loop', or augment their capabilities. In fact, DeLanda went as far as to say that 'Artificial Intelligence has been a product of post-Sputnik military research...'

DeLanda always stressed analogies and models to base his discussions on. One idea I especially liked was how war can be modelled through the chaos theory. In fact, models of war have been created by starting with a mathematical model of something chaotic like flowing water! He showed how various things start to happen during the onset of war that sparks order out of chaos - singularities and thresholds that spark self-organization amoung the respective war machines. This is analogous to flowing water - relatively slow moving water is quite random (as far as we can tell) but when a certain velocity is reached, vortices and eddies occur in highly complex, but mathematical ways. The water 'self-organizes' - fascinating.

DeLanda covers computer applications in war, not just artificially-intelligent computer applications. For me, some of these were the most interesting. For instance, toward the end of the book he talks about how hackers and ex-military scientists cooperated to created the highly interactive usage of computers we have today. Computers used to be big boxes that had cards slotted into them to run programs. With IBM believing the interactive computer was fruitless (ironic, really), it left smaller, innovative computers to come up with the keyboard, mouse and 'friendly' GUI we are used to today.

For those of you interested in warfare (such as myself, to a degree), DeLanda creates an excellent model of how warfare moved from 'stiff' clockwork armies, to more flexible 'motor' systems, to the current day 'distributed-network' armies. DeLanda makes many, many interesting analogies between warfare and different aspects of life or science. Yet another reason why I think the book was badly titled.

I'm happy I read the book because I gained some good insights on war and on the social implications of it. I also admittedly learnt a lot about the development of computers. This, though, was not the reason I started reading the book. Therefore, I would not recommend this book to anyone that doesn't have an interest in war, computers and history. If this book had been mine, I would have called it, "Technology and War" - but that sounds too boring, doesn't it?