Rumors of war and infernal machines Book

A first rate book on how speculative fiction about future wars has shaped the social imaginary of those wars, distorted the ability to anticipate real wars, and also in many cases shaped the actual development of new military technologies. It begins with the 1871 story "The Battle of Dorking" by George Tomkyns Chesney, which imagined the possibility of a German invasion of Britain akin to the crushing defeat that France has just suffered at the hands of the Prussian military a few months earlier.

Gannon then proceeds to create a typology of SF on war: "These might be labeled the 'political future-war narratives' since they are inevitably cautionary tales that offered learned opinions -- and instruction -- on the consequences of pursuing one line of national policy over another." The Chesney story was in this vein. "The second variety of future-war narrative emerges later, in the 1880s, and it might be reasonably labeled the 'technological future-war narrative.' These tales offered opinions and instruction also; their lessons were not in policy but engineering." (11) These two models have remained down to the present day. Victorian and Edwardian future-war tales were often much less flawed iubn their tactical and technological particulars than they were in their overarching strategic and operational visions -- and as such, they helped forge a complacency that Gannon suggests primed Britain for the failure to anticipate the disaster of the Great War.

Although written nearly tewenty years ago the book closes with a discussion of how visions of AI also becomes visions for the possibility of new forms of war. Here I found the discussion quite inspiring. Coders speak of the "extensibility" of a piece of software, that is, the interfaces of a platform that enable the addition of features or customizations, beyond what the original coders imagined. The advent of AI suggests the extensibility of intelligence itself. For example: AI-powered navigation systems both anticipate & shape the motility of masses of people moving through urban space, based not only on real-time GPS-powered measurement but also on algorithmic anticipations of where people will want to go and when. This is a new kind of awareness: the city itself become "artificially" intelligent, beyond any individual human within it ' a novel form of intelligence that anticipates, integrates & supersedes the navigational intelligence of the humans whose "choices" it increasingly guides.