This photograph taken on January 19, 2023 shows a woman walking past the logo of US big data … [+]
The rush to apply cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence to military systems is well under way in Washington, but even more so in Silicon Valley, where venture capital firms and military startups are pushing the pace by investing billions of dollars and engaging in over-the-top hype about the benefits of moving towards automated warfare.
A new paper by Roberto J. Gonzalez for the Brown University Costs of War Project offers a much needed corrective to some of the uncritical cheerleading that has accompanied the debate over emerging military technologies. Contrary to the claims of its advocates, these alleged miracle weapons are not guaranteed to cost less, work better, save lives, deter China, and generally make the world a more peaceful and secure place. Many of these arguments are being pushed by a new breed of techno-evangelists, many of whom stand to make billions if we go down the high tech path they are so aggressively promoting.
In reality, f we rush to deploy these new weapons without adequate debate or scrutiny we could pave the way for a world of perpetual war, unanticipated slaughter, and possibly even an accidental, world ending nuclear conflict. Reducing the time that it takes from identifying a target to destroying it (known as the “kill chain”) and diminishing or eliminating human input could be a recipe for unprecedented disaster. That’s why we urgently need to take analyses like the latest piece from the Brown Costs of War Project seriously, not just as a guide to discussion but as a call to action.
Roberto J. Gonzalez is a Professor of Cultural Anthropology at San Jose State University and the author of War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future, an essential primer on the brave new world of warfare and surveillance being implemented by the Pentagon and the new age military hawks in Silicon Valley. His new paper picks up where that 2022 book left off.
The most important thing to know is that the military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about over 60 years ago is changing, and not in a good way. As Gonzalez notes early on in his piece, “the center of America’s military-industrial complex has been slowly shifting from the Capital Beltway to Silicon Valley” and “a new political economy is emerging, driven by the imperatives of big tech companies, venture capital, and private equity firms.” While this development has been touted as a heralding a much needed wave of innovation that will supplant the system centered on the costly, slow moving, hidebound military-industrial behemoths like Lockheed Martin
There are already signs that these “indispensable tools” aren’t all they are cracked up to be. For example, a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal revealed the dismal performance of U.S.-supplied drones in Ukraine. The article opens with a discussion of small drones sent to the battle front in Ukraine by way of the Silicon Valley firm Skydio. The results have been the exact opposite of the conventional wisdom about emerging U.S. technologies proving their worth on the battlefields of Ukraine:
“Most small drones from U.S. startups have failed to perform in combat, dashing companies’ hopes that a badge of being battle-tested would bring the startups sales and attention. It is also bad news for the Pentagon, which needs a reliable supply of thousands of small, unmanned aircraft.”
The problem?: “Made-in-America drones tend to be expensive, glitchy and hard to repair, said drone company executives, Ukrainians on the front lines, Ukrainian government officials and former U.S. defense officials.“ The solution?: “Ukraine has found ways to get tens of thousands of drones as well as drone parts from China. The military is using off-the-shelf Chinese drones, primarily from SZ DJI Technology.”
This isn’t how it was supposed to play out. The VC firms and arms companies throwing billions into small drones and other emerging tech were hoping to tout the Ukraine war as a proof of concept for their systems, and a marketing tool to boot – after all, what’s more attractive than buying “battle proven” technology? Unfortunately for the people hoping to cash in on new age warfare, reality is not cooperating. For the rest of us, maybe this bump in the road for the new age warriors will at least create some political space to slow the mad rush towards deploying emerging military tech.
But don’t expect the embarrassing news from Ukraine to stem the flow of funds into AI-driven systems, pilotless vehicles, and robotic warfare, absent major pushback from the public. The new Costs of War paper outlines the emerging landscape:
“New Pentagon spending streams are destined for a different breed of defense contractors: a combination of gargantuan tech firms (for example, Microsoft
And Gonzalez has determined that there’s already big money involved: “Between 2019 and 2022, U.S. military and intelligence agencies awarded major tech firms contracts with ceilings worth at least $53 billion combined.”
Gonzalez puts current developments in historical context, reviewing the long history of Pentagon funding of Silicon Valley firms, which helped turn a largely agricultural area into a high tech hub. As just one example of the critical role of military funding to the tech revolution, the Costs of War paper notes that the largest employer in Silicon Valley from the 1950s to the 1990s was the weapons maker Lockheed Martin. The firm’s Sunnyvale plant has recently drawn protests due to the role of Lockheed Martin weapons in enabling Israel’s brutal, criminal attacks on civilians in Gaza.
At a certain point, the surge of opportunities in non-military products – from laptops to cell phones and beyond – led some Silicon Valley firms to focus more on commercial opportunities and less on doing work specifically for the Pentagon. But Gonzalez suggests that this Pentagon/Silicon Valley rift was never as large as the conventional narrative suggests. In any case, the Pentagon has put on a concerted push in recent years to get Silicon Valley firms more directly involved in military work again, spearheaded most enthusiastically by the late Ashton Carter, who served as secretary of defense in the last two years of the Obama administration. The effort has been largely successful, resulting in large military contracts to big tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Google, as well as significant awards to up and coming firms like Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril.
I’ll get into more depth about what all this means in a future column, but Gonzalez does an excellent job of portraying the ideology and agenda of the new tech evangelists, which include the following:
“[A]n AI hype machine that makes grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence; the overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities; the idea that America alone has the ability (and the duty) to protect the world’s democratic societies; and a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a largely unregulated free market that prioritizes corporate needs.’
Gonzalez cites the role of “an interconnected network of tech executives, venture capitalists, think tank analysts, academic researchers, journalists, and Pentagon leaders” in pushing the new agenda, by, among other things, saturating the media landscape “with a frightening scenario: they claim that America is on the verge of losing an epic struggle for global geopolitical and economic supremacy—unless it can outpace China in the ‘AI arms race.’”
There has been push back against the rush to fund and deploy AI-driven weapons, both among tech workers and the growing movement to end the support of U.S. corporations and the U.S. government for Israel’s war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice has suggested can plausibly be considered a case of genocide. Revelations that Israel has used AI not to spare civilians but to step up the rate and scope of its devastation of Gaza is just the latest example of why we need to think twice before acquiescing in the rush towards a world dominated by automated warfare. The time to act is now.
