Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine

In Killer Apps Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a detailed account of the rise of automation in warfare, showing how media systems are central to building weapons systems with artificial intelligence in order to more efficiently select and eliminate military targets. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of political and media theorists, Packer and Reeves develop a new theory for understanding how the intersection of media and military strategy drives today's AI arms race. They address the use of media to search for enemies in their analyses of the history of automated radar systems, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the development of military climate science, which treats the changing earth as an enemy. As the authors demonstrate, contemporary military strategy demands perfect communication in an evolving battlespace that is increasingly inhospitable to human frailties, necessitating humans' replacement by advanced robotics, machine intelligence, and media systems. [...] From the telegraph and the two-way radio to high-frequency satellites and free-space optical communications, media technologies have changed the way in which troops are organized and deployed, the constitution of armies, and the nature and definitions of warfare itself. Focusing in particular on the rise of artificial intelligence technologies, KILLER APPS shows how media helps to produce enemies and enable war. Co-authors Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves offer what they call a polemocentric theory of media escalation, demonstrating that media will never usher in world peace. Quite the opposite-when animated by struggle, media will always escalate towards greater chaos and creative destruction. Each chapter begins with a Department of Defense definition of a military term, and draws from it to theorize the recent escalation of technologies of violence and surveillance. In one chapter, Packer and Reeves critique liberal ideologies of artificial intelligence that suggest it could offer us a feminist and egalitarian future: instead, they demonstrate, AI technologies developed by military contractors serve only to reproduce global capitalism and militarism. Another chapter takes up the historical interpenetration of climate knowledge and warfare to show how global climate catastrophe has enabled and inspired new forms of military and surveillance media technologies. Packer and Reeves trace the history of unmanned military aircraft from explosive balloons used by the Austrian military in 1849, to aerial remote-controlled torpedoes deployed in World War 1, to CIA drone attacks in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan. Finally, they turn to science fiction visions: while authors and filmmakers have often imaged post-apocalyptic moments as a setting for building a liberal future of global harmony, freedom, and unfettered capitalism, Packer and Reeves turn to science fictional visions of robot mutiny and AI-driven nuclear annihilation to consider the role militarized media will have to play in catastrophe. KILLER APPS will interest scholars of media and communication studies, technology studies, and critical studies of militarism and surveillance.