Thinking about the future of war

Futurists tend to make bold claims. We must be careful not to overemphasise the pace of technological change. This was the conclusion of the European Parliament’s recent report: ‘Innovative Technologies shaping the 2040 battlefield’. Instead, it suggested that we should apply ‘technology-agnostic solutions.’ How to be agnostic? This chapter utilises four methodological filters to understand the future of AI and war (1) lexical: language – what do we mean by terms such as ‘new’ and ‘revolutionary’. (2) Ontological – how will Ai transform the human dimension of war by changing the way we think, possibly by producing changes in the brain itself; (3) Imaginative – the future is imagined long before it is realised. What role does sci-fi have to play in second guessing the future? (4) Historical – will we continue to rely on history and historians to foreground evolutionary patterns such as the physical/cerebral upgrades soldiers have been given in the last 2,000 years of military history as well as new upgrades in the human-machine interface. This chapter concludes that AI will once again change the character of war, but it will be many years before it changes its nature.