Prepare for War

We are on the eve of WWIII. We are on the eve of WWIII not because our relationship with China is souring further, not because Europe and the United States are stretching their alliance, and not because Iran’s defiance of America is ushering in a multipolar world. We are on the eve of war for a much colder reason.

We are on the eve of war, of devastation the world hasn’t yet seen, thanks to compounding developments in technology, robotics in particular. I will not link to any online videos of strangely shaped little machines serving coffee, mimicking dogs, running races, or making popcorn, many of which I assume the reader has already seen. I only ask that the reader imagine those same machines stepping on the faces of children.

This year, Ukraine has begun attacking the city of Moscow with drones strikes. An internet search will provide pictures of men in trenches, dressed in nothing but their underwear and VR headsets, waging battle against the enemy. If that were still too much human involvement, rest assured: both Russia and Ukraine are now experimenting with AI-guided drones. The Russo-Ukrainian War has turned into the world’s first exhibit of near-total drone warfare. War—and none there to fight it.

This fact is all the more remarkable for how the war began, with an unprecedented virus of lies that spread through the internet system. I am not about to monger conspiracies. I mean only lies in the most banal sense: Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky heroically remained in Kiev to face the oncoming siege of the capital. Meanwhile, a Russian airstrike destroyed defiant Ukrainian soldiers at their posts who vulgarly refused to surrender, and a Ukrainian ‘ghost’ fighter shot down forty enemy planes. Each of these ‘events’ were proven not to have happened at all. Still, the public conscious acts as if they did, and they number among the most memorable of events from the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War. I only assume we haven’t heard the many lies spread in Russian cyberspace, though I do know of one statement, reported to me by Robert Kaplan, which aged so poorly that it can only be considered a lie by responsibility: just before the invasion, Vladimir Putin told his soldiers to pack their parade uniforms. We can only take consolation in the fact that AI hadn’t been released to the public in 2021, otherwise we would have been flooded with even more untruths.

The ancient principle for the virtuous life was esse quam videri, to be rather than to seem. But in this age, the virtual life seems to be one of videri quam esse. Granted, critical theory is already familiar with Jean Baudrillard’s critique of the non-event hyperreality that is the late modern world. “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” he warned. And propaganda, lies, and rumors of lies have always come with wars and rumors of wars. And indeed, there is a great and catastrophic war, full of terrible suffering, going on right now. At least 400,000 have now perished in the war in Ukraine. Reality, in all its awfulness, is an event for millions as I write. The Russo-Ukrainian War—and now the Israeli-Gazan War and the Iran War—are really taking place, with respect to Baudrillard.

And that is why World War is on the horizon. For we do not act as if war is taking place. Our “economy,” by which I mean the stock market, has been almost totally shielded from the effects of war. No rush of American volunteers flooded the recruitment stations after the outbreak in Ukraine, despite that conflict’s elevation into our culture war consciousness. Nor did zealots fly to Israel or Palestine after October 7 to join the battle—though they did fly to various public displays and debates, videri all, to re-present the conflict. And, of course, the Iran War broke out with neither public approval nor public explanation—nor even consultation. Silicon Valley’s new clarion call, blown by the hot-air-fueled horns of Palantir, Anduril, and a host of other ironically named companies, is autonomous military technology. Some evenings ago, I observed a tech-CEO promote his new autonomous battleship company. He and his pals are placing their bets on there being new wars to fight and few people to fight them. In this moment, the global system appears to be saying: we do not need you.

Even so, where there is technology and production ready for it, a new war will be fought. This is a law as iron as any in human nature. Of course, it is not necessary (here Marx and Spengler are wrong). We do not need to build any of these machines; the CEOs do not need to make so much money building them for contracts; our government does not need to sell them these contracts. But we will. Our will would rather die than stop.

So I predict that, as in WWI, as in so many other wars, we will produce robots and drones and intelligence systems and autonomous weaponry at an incredible scale, and then a spark in some place important or unimportant will set them all in motion to destruction. These mechanics were created, and they will be used.

Perhaps the war won’t be so bad—the robots will be fighting each other, after all. Maybe we can watch the war livestreamed to our living rooms, where we each dine alone on takeout. Maybe. But the arc of war in the last 150 years indicates the opposite. In WWII, civilian deaths compared equally to those of soldiers. This was already a hellish statistical departure from wars of the past, when the overwhelming majority of deaths belonged to soldiers and not civilians. Now, however, in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, an estimated 7,052American soldiers have died, compared to 289-296,000 opposition fighters, while 408,749 civilians have died directly and some 3.6-3.8 million others have perished of starvation or disease. In the next war, if this narrative is any indication, the fight will come to our living rooms indeed.

Again, the present state of the Russo-Ukrainian War prophesies the future. In a recent article for Liberties, Sergei Lebedev described how Russia has turned into a “War Society” where “the boundary between civilian and military, between peace and war, [has] started to become less and less distinct.” The most striking instance of this blurring, according to Lebedev, is technology in education. Schools are now directly training their students to become “officers, soldiers, nurses” for their core professions. Nothing new there.

But this is: Students are being taught to construct and operate drones. “UAV Class” is, increasingly, a core course alongside “patriotic education.” A national project called “Personnel for Unmanned Arial Systems,” which “is scheduled to run until 2035,” Lebedev reports, “includes preschool, school, and university levels.” Preschoolers are no longer civilians; they are combatants. They are being trained to make and hit targets. They will be treated as targets in turn.

Lebedev’s article is meant to invoke horror at Russian society. Indeed, I felt as much. I felt just as unsettled, however, some days later, when I read a New York Times article celebrating the resilience and adaptivity of the Ukrainian people—its title, Bring the Kids and Grab Some Barbecue: A Day at the Ukrainian Drone Races. “The competition, held last month at a theme park in western Ukraine,” offered a “bit of fun, rest and recognition,” and it shows how much “drones have been absorbed into Ukrainian popular culture.” The article makes sure to note how “civilian marketing techniques” have “played a role” in supplying “battlefield need.” I am sure the children had a blast.

My reader will object to me that these two scenarios are quite different. One is top-down, aggressive, and indoctrinating, the other defensive, bottom-up, and voluntary. One is the stuff of goose steps and the other of freedom fighters. But this is human thinking. The machine does not consider these points. The machine sees only one effect: the drones are at home. Home is now a target.

Drones are in Ukraine and Russia. They have not yet come from Iran to the United States. But data centers are coming to your countryside. Later they will come to your neighborhood. They must come, we are told, because we must beat China in the AI race. We have not been told what we are racing toward, beyond at least 10 percent odds of the destruction of the human race. But if this race, whatever it is and wherever it’s going, is so important to win, I doubt that either side would so easily let the other win it, fair and square, builders-only. You must now know, for the sake of your own moral calculation about any new technology: every machine you invite into your neighborhood, into your home, into your life, is a machine that, with good reason, will be treated as a military weapon and target in WWIII, and you and your place will be merely collateral damage.

And perhaps more than merely collateral. Your AI-generated texts and images, your social media posts, or your emails may seem to have nothing to do with geopolitics. But in a society where the line between civilian and combatant has been technologically erased, no byte is safe.

To use another recent, and most controversial example, with some of my own contrition: Like many, I was appalled by the events of October 7, I initially supported Israel’s retaliation against Gaza, and I criticized a tendency in my guild for tender-hearted support of terrorism. But after Gazan buildings started crumbling with their civilians in them, I began to see among some of Israel’s supporters another justification for carnage that was as simultaneously rationalistic and emotive as what I had seen in American academics: Civilian deaths were allowed, in part, because, according to opinion polls such as this one, Palestinians support Hamas and their actions by large majorities. Civilian lives are counted expendable—thanks to the calculation of one sample size extrapolated to speculate about the general opinion of the Palestinian people. This logic troubles me with the following questions: How high must the sample size be to forgive the suffocation of an infant with concrete dust? Is the sociologist in charge of the study liable for any potential war crimes before court of law? Is holding an opinion or answering a survey question in the first place—whatever vile thought you give— enough to count you and your family as members of a defined class now readily expendable?

I ask you these questions, because the compounding ability of AI and other technology to surveil and record your typed and prompted thoughts, and the increasing capacity of data centers to store them, may very well be used against you in WWIII. There may not be any soldiers left to fight, but there will be civilians like you to attack. And the arc of technology has proven to provide every pretense to justify doing so, The next era of war, being cybernetic, will integrate the cyber-psychological space into the battlefield. We’ve long heard about wars over “our values.” Now your values, and your head that holds them, will be players on the field.

Machine wars nonetheless destroy lives. For that is the essence of war. War demands death, the ultimate sacrifice on its bloody altar, and it will not accept silicon or sheet metal as atonement. Its spirit cries out for blood. The machine, its unsanguineous and unthinking servant, will heed the call and fly, hunt, capture, and serve up the living to the holocaust. All at the press of a button—or not even that; the drone will neither mourn nor blink. We will not escape this hellish logic or the god who created it. Precisely by trying to hide behind bigger and smarter machines to commit war for us, I contend, we are preparing ourselves as offerings for its sacrament.

I am concluding with a contradiction. We are mediated from war—largely because we are mediated from reality—now more than ever. We are producing machines that will promise to mediate us from war more than ever still—again, in part because we are producing machines that promise to mediate us from reality more than ever before. But war, when it finally happens, will afflict the public with ten times as much devastation, reality cold and hard, as was promised. War will be everywhere, because it is nowhere in particular.

But this is not a contradiction. It is only a martial application of the Jevons paradox: greater efficiency does not reduce but increases demand. In other words, this is a consequence, not only of how we conduct war, but how we conduct our lives. And our lives, in this day and age, are each and all preparing for one thing only.