War on error

Article in FIff-Kommunikation 4/2021 »Künstliche Intelligenz zieht in den Krieg«

How are humans being objectified by technologies? To a material thing that can be used, at worst destroyed? A sign? How to make human machine readable?
When does killing become a technical-administrative process, does man become a variable that can be replaced by another, a constant that can be deleted without further thought?

Christian Heck

Like the French philosopher Grégoire Chamayou for his book Ferngesteuerte Gewalt – Eine Theorie der Drohne, today we take as our guide a reflection by the anarchist philosopher Simone Weil in the 1930s:

“It would be the most inadequate approach imaginable to approach war and the phenomena of violence from the ends that are pursued, rather than to examine the consequences necessarily implied by the nature of the means employed.”

So let’s look at weapons a little more closely. Their specific Characteristics. The ways and means that determine actions, through which one sees and through which one does, and that help one think. Weapons that ultimately also help determine the effective power of the actions in question. So the transmissions of action knowledge and action power into these technical objects and from there back into us.