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Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century Hardcover – January 22, 2009
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P. W. Singer?s previous two books foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers? predictions that proved all too accurate. Now, he explores the greatest revolution in military affairs since the atom bomb?the advent of robotic warfare.
We are just beginning to see a massive shift in military technology that threatens to make the stuff of I,Robot and the Terminator all too real. More than seven- thousand robotic systems are now in Iraq. Pilots in Nevada are remotely killing terrorists in Afghanistan. Scientists are debating just how smart?and how lethal?to make their current robotic prototypes. And many of the most renowned science fiction authors are secretly consulting for the Pentagon on the next generation.
Blending historic evidence with interviews from the field, Singer vividly shows that as these technologies multiply, they will have profound effects on the front lines as well as on the politics back home. Moving humans off the battlefield makes wars easier to start, but more complex to fight. Replacing men with machines may save some lives, but will lower the morale and psychological barriers to killing. The ?warrior ethos,? which has long defined soldiers? identity, will erode, as will the laws of war that have governed military conflict for generations.
Paradoxically, these new technologies will also bring war to our doorstep. As other nations and even terrorist organizations start to build or buy their own robotic weapons, the robot revolution could undermine America?s military preeminence. While his analysis is unnerving, there?s an irresistible gee-whiz quality to the innovations Singer uncovers. Wired for War travels from Iraq to see these robots in combat to the latter-day ?skunk works? in America?s suburbia, where tomorrow?s technologies of war are quietly being designed. In Singer?s hands, the future of war is as fascinating as it is frightening.
- Print length512 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Press
- Publication dateJanuary 22, 2009
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.45 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-109781594201981
- ISBN-13978-1594201981
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
— Financial Times
“A riveting, important book . . . Singer, at age 29 the youngest scholar named a senior fellow to the Brookings Institute, put four years into writing Wired for War. It is the only book in my reading experience that quotes Immanuel Kant and Biggie Smalls with equal enthusiasm. The resulting book is an intoxicating, encyclopedic trip - made intensely readable by all the colorful characters Singer salts along this story. . . . I will be shelving my copy next to two other books that remade my world view: Tracy Kidder's The Soul of the New Machine and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.”
— Karen Long, book editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer
“P. W. Singer has fashioned a definitive text on the future of war around the subject of robots. In no previous book have I gotten such an intrinsic sense of what the military future will be like.”
— Robert D. Kaplan, author of Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground
“Singer's book is as important (very) as it is readable (highly), as much a fascinating account of new technology as it is a challenging appraisal of the strategic, political and ethical questions that we must now face. This book needs to be widely read -- not just within the defense community but by anyone interested in the most fundamental questions of how our society and others will look at war itself.”
—Anthony Lake, former U.S. National Security Advisor and Professor of Diplomacy , School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
“Drawing from sources spanning popular culture and hard science, Singer reveals how the relationship between man and robot is changing the very nature of war. He details technology that has, until now, been the stuff of science fiction: lethal machines that can walk on water or hover outside windows, machines joined in networks or thinking for themselves. I found this book fascinating, deep, entertaining, and frightening.”
— Howard Gordon, writer and executive producer of 24, The X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"Lively, penetrating, and wise ... A warmly human (even humorous) account of robotics and other military technologies that focuses where it should: on us."
—Richard Danzig, former Secretary of the Navy and Director, National Semiconductor Corporation
“Will wars someday be fought by Terminator-like machines? In this provocative and entertaining new book, one of our brightest young strategic thinkers suggests the answer may well be “yes.” Singer’s sprightly survey of robotics technology takes the reader from battlefields and cutting-edge research labs to the dreams of science fiction writers. In the process, he forces us to grapple with the strategic and ethical implications of the “new new thing” in war.”
—Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; author of The Savage Wars of Peace and War Made New
“Weaving together immaculate academic research with a fan boy’s lexicon of popular culture, Singer looks at the people and technologies beta-testing tomorrow's wars today. The result is a book both hilarious and hair-raising that poses profound ethical questions about the creation and use of ever more powerful killing machines.”
—Gideon Yago, writer, MTV News
“Blew my f***ing mind…This book is awesome.”
—John Stewart, The Daily Show
"A superb book…If you read Wired for War you'll actually get a sense for the complexities that we are creating. We're not making a simpler world with these robots I don't think at all, I think we're making a more complex world, and that is something I got from this great book.
—General James Mattis, USMC, NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation and the Commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command
"In his latest work, Wired for War, Singer confesses his passion for science fiction as he introduces us to a glimpse of things to come–the new technologies that will shape wars of the future. His new book addresses some ominous and little-discussed questions about the military, technology, and machinery."
— Harper’s
"...A vivid picture of the current controversies and dazzling possibilities of war in the digital age."
—Kirkus Reviews
“Genuinely Provocative”
— Book Forum
"…Full of vignettes on the use of robotics, first-person interviews with end- users, what has occurred in the robotics industry in its support of the nation, and what is "coming soon." Some of the new ideas are just downright mind-blowing..."
—The Armchair General
"An admitted war geek, P.W. Singer obsesses—over the course of 400-plus pages— about the growing role of robots in combat. His tone is oddly jovial considering the unsettling subject matter, but you won't find a more comprehensive look at mechanized death outside science fiction."
—Details Magazine
"If you want the whole story of remote warfare, pick up a copy of Wired for War, in which Peter Singer, a fellow of the non-profit Brookings Institution in Washington DC, exhaustively documents the Pentagon's penchant for robotics. Think of it as the next step in the mechanisation of war: swords and arrows, guns, artillery, rockets, bombers, robots."
— The New Scientist
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
WHY A BOOK ON ROBOTS AND WAR?
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
—ISAAC ASIMOV
Because robots are frakin’ cool.
That’s the short answer to why someone would spend four years researching and writing a book on new technologies and war. The long answer is a bit more complex.
As my family will surely attest, I was a bit of an odd kid. All kids develop their hobbies and even fixations, be it baseball cards or Barbie dolls. Indeed, I have yet to meet a six-year-old boy who did not have an encyclopedic knowledge of all things dinosaur. For me growing up, it was war. I could be more polite and say military history, but it was really just war. In saying the same about his childhood, the great historian John Keegan wrote, “It is not a phrase to be written, still less spoken with any complacency.” But it is true nonetheless.
Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that the generations before me had all served in the military. They left several lifetimes’ worth of artifacts hidden around the house for me to pilfer and play with, whether it was my dad’s old military medals and unit insignia, which I would take out and pin to my soccer jersey, or the model of the F-4 Phantom jet fighter that my uncle had flown over Vietnam, which I would run up and down the stairs on its missions to bomb Legoland.
But the greatest treasure trove of all was at my grandparents’ house. My grandfather passed away when I was six, too young to remember him as much more than the kindly man whom we would visit at the nursing home. But I think he may have influenced this aspect of me the most.
Chalmers Rankin Carr, forever just “Granddaddy” to me, was a U.S. Navy captain who served in World War II. Like all those from what we now call “the Greatest Generation,” he was one of the giants who saved the world. Almost every family gathering would include some tale from his or my grandmother’s (“Maw Maw” to us grandkids) experiences at war or on the home front.
It’s almost a cliché to say, but the one that stands out is the Pearl Harbor story; although, as with all things in my family, it comes with a twist. On December 7, 1941, my grandfather was serving in the Pacific Fleet on a navy transport ship. For three months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the family didn’t hear any word from him and worried for the worst. When his ship finally came back to port (it had actually sailed out of Pearl Harbor just two days before the attack), he immediately called home to tell his wife (my grandmother) and the rest of his family that he was okay. There were only two problems: he had called collect, and that side of my family is Scotch-Irish. No one would accept the charges. While my grandfather cursed the phone operator’s ear off, in the way that only a sailor can, on the other end the family explained to the operator that since he was calling, he must be alive. So there was no reason to waste money on such a luxury as a long-distance phone call.
Granddaddy’s study was filled with volume after volume of great books, on everything from the history of the U.S. Navy to biographies of Civil War generals. I would often sneak off to this room, pull out one of the volumes, and lose myself in the past. These books shaped me then and stay with me now. One of my most prized possessions is an original-edition 1939 Jane’s Fighting Ships that my grandfather received as a gift from a Royal Navy officer, for being part of the crew that shipped a Lend-Lease destroyer to the Brits. As I type these very words, it peers down at me from the shelf above my computer.
My reading fare quickly diverged from that of the other kids at Myers Park Elementary School. A typical afternoon reading was less likely to be exploring how Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective, cracked The Case of the Missing Roller Skates than how Audie Murphy, the youngest soldier ever to win the Medal of Honor, went, as he wrote in his autobiography, To Hell and Back. War soon morphed over into the imaginary world that surrounds all kids like a bubble. Other kids went to Narnia, I went to Normandy. While it may have looked like a normal Diamondback dirt bike, my bicycle was the only one in the neighborhood that mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns on the handlebars, to shoot down any marauding Japanese Zeros that dared to ambush me on my way to school each morning. I still remember my mother yelling at me for digging a five-foot-deep foxhole in our backyard when I was ten years old. She clearly failed to understand the importance of setting up a proper line of defense.
I certainly can’t claim to have been a normal kid, but in my defense, you also have to remember the context. To be so focused on war was somewhat easier in that period. It was the Reagan era and the cold war had heated back up. The Russians wouldn’t come to our Olympics and we wouldn’t go to theirs, the military was cool again, and we had no questions about whether we were the good guys. Most important, as a young Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen taught us in Red Dawn, not only were the Commies poised to parachute right into our schools, but it was likely us kids who would have to beat them back.
What I find interesting, and a sign of the power of Hollywood’s marketing machine, is that usually some artifact from science fiction is in the background of these memories, intertwined with the history. For example, when I think back to my childhood bedroom, there are the model warships from my grandfather’s era lined up on display, but also Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca peeking up from my Star Wars bedsheets.
As most of science fiction involved some good guy battling some bad guy in a world far, far away, the two memes of my fantasy world went together fairly well. In short, your author was the kind of little boy to whom a stick was not a mere piece of wood, but the makings of a machine gun or a lightsaber that could save the world from both Hitler and Darth Vader.
WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
I look back on these memories with some embarrassment, but also guilt. Of course, even then, I knew that people die in war and many soldiers didn’t come home, but they were always only the buddy of the hero, oddly enough usually from Brooklyn in most World War II movies. The reality of war had no way of sinking in.
It was not until years later that I truly understood the human costs of war. I remember crossing a jury-rigged bridge into Mostar, a town in Bosnia that saw some of the worst fighting in the Yugoslav civil war. I was there as part of a fact-finding mission on the UN peacekeeping operation. Weeks of back-and-forth fighting had turned block after block of factories and apartments on the riverfront into a mass of hollowed-out hulks. The pictures of World War II’s Stalingrad in an old book on my grandfather’s shelf had sprung up to surround and encompass me. The books never had any smell other than dust, but here, even well after the battles, a burnt, fetid scent still hung in the air. Down the river were the remnants of an elegant 500-year-old bridge, which had been blasted to pieces by Serb artillery. The people, though, were the ones who drove it home. “Haunted” is the only adjective I can think of to describe the faces of the refugees.
The standout memory, though, was of a local provincial governor we met with. A man alleged to have orchestrated mass killing and ethnic cleansing campaigns for which he would soon after be indicted, he sat at an immense wooden desk, ominously framed by two nationalist paramilitary (and hence illegal) flags. But he banally talked about his plans to build up the tourism industry after the war. He explained that the war had destroyed many of the factories and cleaned out whole villages. So on the positive side, the rivers were now clear and teeming with fish. Forget the war crimes or the refugees, he argued, if only the United States and United Nations would wise up and give him money, the package tourists would be there in a matter of weeks.
This paradox between the “good” wars that I had fought in my youth and the seamy underside of war in the twenty-first century has since been the thread running through my writing. During that same trip, I met my first private military contractors, a set of former U.S. Army officers, who were working in Sarajevo for a private company. Their firm wasn’t selling widgets or even weapons, but rather the very military skills of the soldiers themselves. This contradiction between our ideal of military service and the reality of a booming new industry of private companies leasing out soldiers for hire became the subject of my first book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. During the research, I was struck by another breakdown of the traditional model of who was supposed to be at war. In West Africa, the main foes of these new private soldiers were rebel bands, mostly made up of children. Many of these tiny soldiers had been abducted from their schools and homes. For me as a child, war had merely been a matter of play; for these children, war was the only way to survive. My next book, Children at War, tried to tell their story, in a way that didn’t just tug at heartstrings, but also explained the causes and effects of child soldiers, such that we might finally act to end this terrible practice.
This contradiction of war as we imagine it to be, versus how it really is, isn’t just the matter of a young boy growing up and putting his lightsaber away. It is part of something bigger that has haunted humanity from its very start.
One of the original sins of our species is its inability to live at peace. From the very beginning of human history, conflicts over food, territory, riches, power, and prestige have been constant. The earliest forms of human organization were clans that first united for hunting, but soon also for fighting with other clans over the best hunting grounds. The story of the dawn of civilization is a story of war, as these clans transformed into larger tribes and then to city-states and empires. War was both a cause and effect of broader social change. From war sprung the very first specializations of labor, the resulting stratification into economic classes, and the creation of politics itself.
The result is that much of what is written in human history is simply a history of warfare. It is a history that often shames us. And it should. War is not just merely human destruction, but the most extreme of horror and waste wrapped together. Our great religions view war as perhaps the ultimate transgression. In the Bible, for example, King David was prohibited from building his holy Temple, because, as God told him, “You are a warrior who has shed blood” (1 Chronicles 28). The ancient prophets’ ideal vision of the future is a time when we “will learn warfare no more” (Isaiah 2:4). As one religious scholar put it, “War is a sign of disobedience and sinfulness. War is not intended by God. All human beings are made in the image of God and they are precious and unique.”
The same disdain for war was held by our great intellectuals. Thucydides, the founder of both the study of history as well as the science of international relations, described war as a punishment springing from man’s hubris. It is our arrogance chastised. Two thousand years later, Freud similarly described it as emanating from our Thanatos, the part of our psyche that lives out evil.
Yet for such a supposed abomination, we sure do seem to be obsessed with war. From architecture to the arts, war’s horrors have fed the heights of human creativity. Many of our great works of literature, arts, and science either are inspired by war or are reactions to it, from the founding epics of literature like Gilgamesh and the Iliad to the great painters of surrealism to the very origins of the fields of chemistry and physics.
War then, appears in many more guises than the waste of human destruction that we know it to be. War has been described as a testing ground for nobility, the only true place where man’s “arête” (excellence) could be won. In the Iliad, the master narrative for all of Western literature, for example, “fighting is where man will win glory.” From Herodotus to Hegel, war is described as a test of people’s vitality and even one culture’s way of life versus another. War is thus often portrayed in our great books as a teacher—a cruel teacher who reveals both our strengths and faults. Virtues are taught through stories of war from Homer to Shakespeare, while evils to avoid are drawn out by war in stories ranging from Aeschylus to Naipaul.
War is granted credit for all sorts of great social change. Democracy came from the phalanx and citizen rowers of the ancient Greeks, while the story of modern-day civil rights would not be the same without Rosie the Riveter or the African American soldiers of the Red Ball Express in World War II.
War then is depicted as immoral, yet humanity has always found out-clauses to explain its necessity and celebration. The same religions that see violence as a sin also licensed wars of crusade and jihad. And it is equally the case in politics. We repeatedly urge war as the means to either spread or defeat whatever ideology is in vogue at the time, be it enlightenment, imperialism, communism, fascism, democracy, or even simply “to end all wars.”
This paradox continues in American politics today. Avoidance of war has been a traditional tenet of our foreign policy. Yet we have been at war for most of our nation’s history and many of our greatest heroes are warriors. We are simultaneously leaders of weapons development, being the creator of the atomic bomb, and the founders of arms control, which seeks its ban.
We are repulsed by the idea of war, and yet entranced by it. In my mind, there are two core reasons for humankind’s almost obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first is that war brings out the most powerful emotions that define what it is to be human. Bravery, honor, love, leadership, pity, selflessness, comradeship, commitment, charity, sacrifice, hate, fear, and loss all find their definitive expressions in the fires of war. They reach their ultimate highs and lows, and, in so doing, war is almost addictive to human culture. As William James put it, “The horror is the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis.”
The other reason that war so consumes us is that for all humanity’s advancement, we just can’t seem to get away from it. After nearly every war, we cite the immense lessons we learned that will prevent that calamity from repeating itself. We say over and over, “Never again.” Yet the reality is “ever again.”
“THE FUTURE AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE”
Product details
- ASIN : 1594201986
- Publisher : Penguin Press; First Edition (January 22, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 512 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781594201981
- ISBN-13 : 978-1594201981
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 1.78 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.45 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #681,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #214 in Military Policy (Books)
- #324 in Robotics & Automation (Books)
- #336 in Sociology of Social Theory
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Hi! My formal biography and links to all my books and articles are at www.pwsinger.com but the short version is that I am someone who loves to read, and hopes to write books that people love to read too.
You can also follow me on twitter @peterwsinger
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While reading an article by the pentagon correspondent of the Washington Times about new technologies, mention was made of the recently released book Wired for War The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P.W.Singer. This book is a study of technology and society from the present and into the future, so I thought it would be a worthwhile read. I was not disappointed. It is as profound as Brute Force by John Ellis. This is a very important book that should be read by scientists, engineers, and historians and in fact all citizens. It is very troubling and frightening.
This book is in many ways a mirror image of The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis. In Ellis's book resistance to technological change by the military is examined. "For them war was an act of will. Military memories and tradition had been formed in the pre-industrial age when the final bayonet or cavalry charge might be decisive. For them, in the last analysis, man was the master of the battlefield"(Ellis pg. 50). The officers refused to be a cog in the military machinery because in their eyes the machine gun made them replaceable. The movies Four Feathers and Beau Geste characterize the group very will indeed. In Wired for War the obverse is seen. The generals and admirals are highly enthusiastic proponents of technological advancements, in fact many times are seen pushing for more and more robotics. To compare the mind sets, imagine Paaschendale vs. the Terminator.
Unless you are an IT or computer engineer you probably would be unfamiliar with many of the terms that represent the key stage of progress, ideas and principles in robotics and AI. In this book you are introduced to the technology and theory in a very understandable why. It presents the historic, societal and psychological implications of military robots and AI.
To begin with, the word robot was first used by Czechoslovak writer Karel Capeck in his play Rossum's Universal Robots. Its origin was from the Czechoslovak word robota to describe the work a peasant owed the landlord. It also means drudgery. Other terms the reader becomes familiar with are; strong AI, when computers attain processing and storage of information billions or trillions faster than a human and become self aware and Singularity which is superhuman intelligence that leave the human out of the feedback loop and outside of the equation.
The reader is also introduced to the major players, both individuals and production companies involved in military robots. The one individual who the author seems to quote the most is Ray Kurzweil. This person is unbelievably brilliant inventor who dwarfs Edison. He is the inventor of the automated college application program, the first print to speech machine, the first computer flatbed scanner, the electronic music synthesizer and predictor of the internet. He is also one of five members of the Army Science Board, where one of his tasks is simply to think of new weapons systems for future development. The author also gives detail analysis of General Atomic, iRobot and Foster Miller who are manufacturers of the Predator drone, PackBot robot and Swords robot respectively. There is considerable discussion about DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I have learned from the book that this is a truly remarkable organization. It receives a massive amount of funding, much of it hidden like the CIA budget, but uses it very wisely and strategically. It awards contracts to universities and manufactures to conceive, develop, test and manufacture robotic and AI systems. It also has in house developmental teams. One of the most interesting facts was all inventors and researchers were science fictions readers at an early age and continue to this day. In fact many facilities have individuals who have a specific job of reading sci-fi novels to generated new ideas and use them as a matrix for future development.
Singer has some very insightful analysis of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, such as "One side looks at war instrumentally, as a means to an end, while the other sees it metaphysically, placing great meaning on the very act of dying for a cause" (pg. 312) and "the rest of the world is learning that the only way to defeat America is to bleed her on both ends. The American public responds to casualties and to bleeding of the treasury, so if something goes on long enough they get tired"(pg. 313).
The author has done very extensive interviews, not only of the High Command at DARPA, scientists, engineers and manufactures, but also the end users. Some of the most interesting vignettes were from the soldiers and marines using PackBot, Talon and Swords in combat. To the man they swear by the efficiency of robots in detecting IEDs, snipers, mortar positions and enemy combatants in house to house fighting. In fact soldiers may become emotionally attached to their robot like they would a pet dog. There is a parallel to soldiers in the care of robots. When the robot is "wounded" it is taken to a repair facility(called the robot hospital) which is close to the frontline and often in close proximity to the combat surgical station. When dealing with drones there is a dichotomy, with one group in the combat zone and another far removed. The Army controls many smaller drones from transportable cubicles which are part of command (divisional or battalion) headquarters. Their function is to observe the battlefield and have observational data downloaded to a computer and then onto a large plasma screen at division headquarters. This data can then be sent to hardened laptops in tactical units even down to squad level. There are also hand launched drones that are specifically used at company and platoon levels that download to squad laptops. This has lead to what "Marine general Charles Krulak called the rise of the `strategic corporal.' This idea was meant to describe how new technology put far more destructive power (and thus influence over strategic outcomes) into the hands of younger, more junior troops. A twenty year-old corporal could now call in airstrikes that a forty-year old colonel used to decide in the past. But these technologies are also producing something new, which I call the `tactical general.' While they are becoming more distanced from the battlefield, generals are becoming more involved in the real-time fighting of war"(pg. 349) This paradigm shift in warfare has lead to problems with information overload at divisional levels. DARPA has tried to address this by developing AI programs that will assist commanders in using all of the data in the most logical and strategic manner. This can lead to problems in the future which I will discuss later.
One of the most interesting observations the book makes is the enthusiasm that the Marine Corps, Army and Navy had toward robotics and drones. The Air Force was very resistant. That is not to say that the Air Force eschewed advanced computer technology and AI research, but they fought very hard to mute drone development. In the mean time the other three forces forged ahead rapidly. As in The Social History of the Machine Gun the Air Force culture had too much investment into manned flight to be able to make the transition easily. It was only when their preeminence in control of the air space was threatened that they made the transition. During the early part of the war on terrorism the Army had more observational and tactical aircraft in the air than the Air Force. This is when they realized they were losing "market share". They quickly transitioned and are now flying the Predator and Global Hawk. What is truly amazing is these aircraft flying over Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are actually controlled in cubicles located in Nevada. The pilots leave home, fly drones for 12 hours, and then drive back home to see their families. This would be unimaginable 15 years ago.
All of this research and development in robotic and AI has lead to a dilemma. Almost to the man, the scientists and engineers believe Singularity will occur within 40 years. "A machine takeover is generally imagined as following a path of evolution to revolution. Computers eventually develop to the equivalent of human intelligence (strong AI) and then rapidly push past any attempts at human control. Ray Kurzwiel explains how this would work. `As one strong AI immediately begets many strong AIs, the latter access their own design, understand and improve it, more intelligent AI, with the cycle repeating itself and thereby very rapidly evolve into a yet more capable, more intelligent AI, with the cycle repeating itself indefinitely. Each cycle not only creates more intelligent AI, but takes less time than the cycle before it as in the nature of technological
evolution. The premise is that once strong AI is achieved, it will immediately become a runaway phenomenon of rapidly escalating super intelligence."(pg.416-417) This is very frightening indeed. Because of our continued advance in robotics and AI, the author ends with feeling that the U.S. will eventual be able to bring peace to the world before we step over the abyss of Singularity. I feel he has an unrealistic view of humanity. To quote Albert Einstein "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidly, and I'm not sure about the former."
With Mr. Donald Rumsfeld as the new secretary of defense under President Bush, and as a part of the organizational shakeup he initiated, a new Office of Force Transformation was created and Mr. Cebrowski was designated as the director. With Network-Centric Warfare, "speed and agility and precision can take the place of mass," Mr. Rumsfeld touted. Early successes seemed to have bolstered the ideology behind this new type of warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq, until insurgents begged to differ. Mr. Milan Vego, a U.S. Naval War College professor assessed the U.S. military effort in Iraq as follows: "There is probably no conflict in which U.S. forces have fought in such ignorance of the enemy's purpose, strength, and leadership."
According to Mr. Singer, Mr. Cebrowski and his supporters of network-centric crusaders were correct in their assessment of big changes in the conduct of warfare, but "they were wrong on everything else." The network-centric idea is an enabler, not an RMA. Mr. Singer believes top thinkers and leaders in American security policy are oblivious to the true RMA on the horizon: Robotics and other unmanned technologies. "Today's major codes of international law in war, the Geneva Conventions, are so old that they almost qualify for Medicare." No other major international war policy organization such as the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) has addressed the rules surrounding the use of warbots either, perhaps because the most advanced robot today "has a hard time even distinguishing an apple from a tomato" (p. 402 of hardcopy). Nevertheless, the use of unmanned technologies such as drones and robots armed with weapons has become pervasive in the U.S. military, particularly in Iraq. As advances in technology continue to enhance their use, they will dominate every aspect of war, and the military culture will experience a profound transformation on numerous levels as a result.
In a comprehensive and well researched book, Mr. Singer, a noted visionary in military matters, discusses the forces that drive advancements in military technology and the implications of their widespread use. Mr. John Pike of the Global Security organization put it succinctly when he said, "First, you had human beings without machines. Then, you had human beings with machines. And finally, you have machines without human beings."
"Wired for War" should have been more focused with fewer topics covered. This book reminds me of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World ; another excellent futuristic book with rich content but without sufficient editing. If you're interested in how the wars of the future are fought, Mr. Singer's "Wired for War" will explain it to you in a marathon session. You need some endurance to get through it (or comprehension enhancing vitamins).
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Pour la petite info, les développeurs du Jeu Call Of Duty Black Ops 2 se sont inspirés de ce livre pour la trame de leur jeu.