ABSTRACT
War & Society, a recent book by Centeno and Enriquez (2016), shows how wars and preparation for war transform societies. This chapter looks at how a radical innovation driven by military objectives – i.e. military enormous investments in combined artificial intelligence, social network analyses and computational social science – might represent a form of anticipation of forthcoming social and organizational changes. It is based on fragments of knowledge on how the contemporary military combines these techniques to think of war as comprising “Fire-and-Forget Swarms”, i.e. digitally self-organizing systems with “deep learning” and groups of robotized soldiers at the core of this “self-organization”. After providing a flavor of research funded by the military in that area, the chapter speculates about the new bureaucratic model of (fake) self-organization that this fascination for swarms generates for collective agency at large. It questions in particular changes in the forms of collective responsibility that thisdigitalization promotes for contemporary societies, with associated growing forms of collateral damage.
