The Intellectual Inheritance of Machine Learning and the Ethics of Algorithmic War

Abstract In this article I am concerned with interrogating the intersection between the Newtonian and Cartesian intellectual inheritances of AI and machine learning, and ideas about the ethics of war. As militaries turn to new and emerging technologies to maintain or achieve a technological edge over their perceived adversaries, they create new imaginaries of future war—alongside the technologists, academics, and defense scientists crafting new terms, ideologies, and frameworks for making sense of these technologies. In this article I will argue that the intellectual inheritances of machine learning strengthen certain pre-existing tendencies of thinking about ethics and war that function to push the experience of war, particularly for those subjected to it, to one side. The first of these is ethics as code, which in its most extreme form seeks to quantify ethics. The second is ethics as identity, in which we see the reduction of complex ethical debates to a simple belief that “we” are the ethical actors and the “other” is not. To combat the expansion of militarism that these narratives enable we must foreground the experience of war, both of those subject to it and of those creating the conditions for war.