War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

by Manuel DeLanda

In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel DeLanda, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications; he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. The recent emergence of intelligent and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capabilities is, for Delanda, part of a much larger transfer of cognitive structures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century.War in the Age of Intelligent Machines provides a rich panorama of these astonishing developments; it details the mutating history of information analysis and machinic organization from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and the Nazi blitzkrieg up to present-day cybernetic battle-management systems and satellite reconnaissance networks. Much more than a history of warfare, DeLanda's account is an unprecedented philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed, and made effective.Manuel DeLanda has published essays on philosophy and film theory. He is a computer programmer and a film artist.A Swerve Edition, distributed for Zone Books

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, History, War, Nonfiction, Science, Technology

280 pages, Paperback

First published December 26, 1991

About the author

Manuel DeLanda (b. in Mexico City, 1952), based in New York since 1975, is a philosopher, media artist, programmer and software designer. After studying art in the 1970s, he became known as an independent filmmaker making underground 8mm and 16mm films inspired by critical theory and philosophy. In the 1980s, Manuel De Landa focused on programing, writing computer software, and computer art. After being introduced to the work of Gilles Deleuze, he saw new creative potential in philosophical texts, becoming one of the representatives of the 'new materialism'.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines posits a whole phylum of life known as the "machinic phylum" made up of non-biological but self-organizing structures like storm systems, naturally occurring drainage networks, and up to and including computers and artificial intelligence. De Landa explains that humans have acted as a sort of midwife for the machinic phylum, helping to develop its tree of life and thriving as a consequence. In addition to this theory, he proposes that war and society have coevolved to a great degree, even to the point that war has acted as a shepherd for society, guiding it through its many stages and ensuring its steady evolution and survival. With these two principles as a guide, he sets about the task of rewriting history. It's dry at times (for instance as he methodically describes the role of morale and tactics in Napolean's armies) but the journey is worth taking and the overarching conclusions that he reaches are fascinating and do seem to provide some good explanatory power in regards to history and technology (and particularly the history of technology -- something I'm interested in as a human and a technologist). The book is dated in a number of ways -- for one thing, it was written before the emergence of the internet as we know it -- there is a reference to something called "INTERNET" towards the end of the book, but the internet is not even included in the book's index. He does seem to predict its eventual development, along with a number of other developments in computer science (neural networks and other AI practices, for instance). These asynchronicities make the book fun in a special way, and the continuous reference to Chaos Theory and it's associated jargon ("bifurcations", "strange atractors", etc) placed it firmly in the 90s which is also fun in its own way. A good read.

[Xbal · Rating 5 out of 5]

illuminating, a completely new view of war...

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a disclaimer, I only read about half of this book before it was recalled by someone else. I'm not particularly enamored of De Landa's writing style; he doesn't spice up the language often enough and frequently quotes entire paragraphs at a time. As a scholar, his work is interesting, and I really appreciate the de-centering of humanity's role in his works, which shows through here in how the "machinic phylum" and certain singularities influence military/industrial development. That being said, he's not really developing new ideas so much as applying a limited set of Deleuzoguattarian formulas using numerous scientists and historians as supporting evidence. The uninitiated would be better off with his "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History," which is very similar but covers much more ground and it's more interesting ground at that.

[Danyell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the most important (and certainly the most useful) book I've ever read about the history of computers and cybernetics.

[tyler]

honestly... really unsure about this book. i found the intro and first chapter interesting, but i started to lose steam drastically starting in chapter 2.

this book was published in 1991, so "intelligent machines" means something completely different than it does today... like "awww it's so cute that delanda is worried that the government spent a zillion dollars and 5 decades to be able to play a more complicated version of Risk on building-sized computers"

fast forward 30 years: after snowden, assange, manning, winner, Anonymous, nation-state hacktors, civilian wire tapping/prism, civilian insurgent cyberwarfare (https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-r...), after the internet and social media exploded and our attention has been totally colonized by capital, after chatgpt and stable diffusion and deepfakes and cryptocurrency... who knows what the governments and corporations are ACTUALLY up to??? zizek suggested that DARPA is trying to influence behavior through direct biogenetic intervention (desert of post-ideology, ~1:15:17) instead of just through propaganda/consumerism/etc. of course, that crazy idea has long since gone mainstream with the help of qanon/alt-right ghouls that think the government is trying to control us with 5g or vaccines or whatever.

it's already easy to imagine a shadowy figure ordering someone somewhere to "dial the nostalgia factor up by 10% today, people are getting a little too unsettled with recent bad news and we need to distract them." (or, more concretely & topically, "let's shoot down another balloon to distract people from (insert boogeyman here)")

i'm wondering how this book could have been simultaneously so prescient and yet totally toothless? zizek* said something along the lines of: philosophy shouldn't try to help us to understand the world, but that its purpose should be to illuminate how truly fucked we are. in that sense, this book is an abysmal failure. one of humanity's newest threats is the "world in chains" scenario where (with the help of highly advanced technology), an entity institutes a world totalitarian state that has complete control over everyone through total diffusion of surveillance or some other means (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20...). but this book does not feel like it pointed in that direction, and i'm wondering how? isn't this where we've been headed for a long time?

---
that's not to say that this book is totally unhelpful. key food for thought:
1) instead of strict centralized control, we (and machines) are most effective when we are able to overcome (in some sense) the friction inherent in processes to create emergent structures, a sort of "flow" state (in delanda's terminology, "to allow the machinic phylum to cut across [things], joining them together" although he does state that isn't always possible ("In fact, as I have argued, it is normally incapable of doing so"). looking at life in terms of the machinic phylum (as opposed to a strict biological/technological dichotomy) does leave room for hope, even if "the role of humans would be seen as little more than that of industrious insects pollinating an independent species of machine-flowers that simply did not possess its own reproductive organs during a segment of its evolution."

2) delanda also talks a lot about artisans and sensuality, but it is unclear to me how that fits into the rest of the narrative that he is striving for -- are we to become artisans so we can 'tease out' various forms from matter? that seems unwise given how quickly things move these days. should we try to re-purpose the tools that have been developed? i find it to be a bit of a romantic & idealistic (in a positive way), and it does seem central to his thesis.

3) the perspective of the 'robot historian' which "would likely place a stronger empha­sis on the way these machines affected human evolution."

yeah. idk. weird book. and this review is a fucking mess.

* sorry for so many mentions of zizek - i just watched a lecture a few nights ago so it was front-of-mind and seemed relevant, i don't know nearly enough about him to have an actual opinion of his work.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a very intriguing read, the concept of this book is that it catalogs the evolution of machines from the most basic physics to the Internet and the very beginnings of AI. Much of the book details how the biological phylum (humans) discovered something in the mechanical phylum which then caused an evolution in that space. Much of the mechanical phylum was initially evolved due to war or other similar situations, but then people took it and converted it to use for the everyday individual and then the military groups would use that technology to then cause another evolution. It also talks about the several points in history when evolution in the mechanical phylum caused major changes in the underlying understanding of how it should be used. This book is a little bit outdated in terms of where it ended, but the history and concepts that it walks through are fascinating and provides a unique perspective on the relationship between humans and technology.

[Vikas Erraballi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice companion to Anderson, van Creveld, Luttwak, Isaacson, Edwards. In many ways a superior synthesis of those.

[宗儒 李 · Rating 5 out of 5]

看了一個多月總算是看完了... 這本書東拉西扯講了一堆東西，雖然是上個世紀九零年代的書但在 2021 年讀也是非常切中要點。有一段在講 warfare being infused into managerial science 的，讀到那邊的時候剛好聽到目前公司的老闆在講 win rate 跟戰略目標之類的，個人是覺得也算是有開到腦洞的一本書。除了字很小看得很累之外，真的是很推。

[Святослав · Rating 5 out of 5]

Old, but valuable and profound

[Nick Black]

Amazon 2008-11-05. I celebrate our bold new leader by developing a bold new interest in De Landa!

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and clearly written.

[Leonardo]

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