Still ‘the human thing’? Technology, human agency and the future of war
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117818754640 |
| Date | 01 March 2018 |
| Published date | 01 March 2018 |
| Author | Christopher Coker |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117818754640
International Relations
2018, Vol. 32(1) 23 –38
© The Author(s) 2018
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0047117818754640
journals.sagepub.com/home/ire
Still ‘the human thing’?
Technology, human agency
and the future of war
Christopher Coker
London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract
Is war beginning to escape human control? Thucydides tells us the war is one of the things that
makes us definitively human; but how long will this continue to be the case as our relationship
with technology continues to develop? Kenneth Waltz’s book Man, the State and War affords one
way of answering that question. So too does Nikolaas Tinbergen’s framework for understanding
human behaviour and Bruno Latour’s Actor–Network Theory (ANT). The main focus of this
article is the extent to which we will diminish or enhance our own agency as human beings,
especially when we come to share the planet with an intelligence higher than our own.
Keywords
actor network theory, artificial intelligence (AI), function, image, Latour, mechanisms, ontogeny,
origins, technology, Thucydides, Tinbergen, Waltz, war
Introduction
There is a very real prospect that the character of war is changing faster than many of us
imagine: that autonomous weapons systems will soon be making their own targeting
decisions, and that soldiers will be coexisting in the field with the next generation of
military robots. All of this would probably have amazed the great historian Thucydides
who famously called war to anthropon, the ‘human thing’. It was, in fact, the only
definition that he was willing to volunteer. War throws a light on what we still call
‘human nature’: often, the things that men do in war is what war has done to them. Even
the bravest soldiers may be traumatised by what they do or witness on the battlefield, and
rarely are their enemies beyond the reach of human understanding or compassion. For
Corresponding author:
Christopher Coker, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street,
London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: c.coker@lse.ac.uk
754640IRE0010.1177/0047117818754640International RelationsCoker
research-article2018
Article
24 International Relations 32(1)
that reason, war has been rooted from the beginning in the bitter and unyielding experi-
ence of being human.
This article sets out to discuss what it may mean to be human in a world in which
machines have become collaborators, not tools. Like his fellow Greeks, Thucydides
thought of humans in binomial terms: the difference between us and (other) animals,
between men and women, and the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbarous’. Binomial thinking, of
course, is merely a way of organising information – it is useful in the historical setting in
which it is useful, and it is not useful in others. But what is interesting is that the Greeks
did not distinguish between man and machine, in part because they had no concept of
‘technology’. In the modern age, it has become one of the most important concepts of all,
as too has the distinction which people often draw between man and machine – a distinc-
tion which is becoming increasingly blurred. We are already witnessing the first tentative
steps towards the coming post-human amalgam of human and machine, the confronta-
tion and conflation of which remains a central theme of science fiction.
The post-human implies just another step in our evolution in one of three principal
ways. (1) We may find ourselves eventually displaced as the most intelligent species on
the planet – at some point machines may be able to reproduce and reprogramme them-
selves, at which stage we may have to talk of the evolution of the first post-biological life
forms on the planet. (2) We are also edging towards automated evolution. Darwinian
selection is described as being random, purposeless, dumb and godless; automated evo-
lution, by contrast, is targeted, purposeful and intelligent – we are behind it. (3) We are
also seeing the fusing of humanity and machine. In the military field, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to improve human performance on
the battlefield – on one hand, re-engineering soldiers through pharmacology (drug use),
neuroscience (brain implants) and molecular biology (re-engineering the human body);
and on the other, investing in advanced robotics, machine learning and artificial intelli-
gence (AI). The two, we are told, will be increasingly imbricated: reconfigured soldiers
will partner with increasingly intelligent, autonomous machines. (Imbricate, by the way,
is just a fancy term for describing how things overlap.) But more than overlapping may
be involved. Humans and machines won’t be overlapping, as much as fusing: allowing a
soldier for example to access information directly into the brain through neural implants
rather than having to use a computer screen.
Can all this be regarded as an extension of our humanity, a performance upgrade, or
is it a threat to the control of our own future? Are we fusing with technology or about to
be replaced by it? Eventually, will we have to coexist with machines on their terms, not
ours; and how long will it be before they cease to be tools and instead become collabora-
tors? Above all, what are the implications of the changing relationship between man and
machine for the understanding of war in the discipline of International Relations?
Waltz and human nature
International Relations began life by studying why states went to war. Kenneth Waltz’s
seminal book Man, the State and War provides one of the clearest explanations. From the
date of its publication in 1959, it rapidly became what it has remained ever since, an
unassailable classic. And Waltz broke new ground looking at its causes from three
To continue reading
Request your trial