Artificial Intelligence and the Urban Battle
by Anthony KingSeptember 7, 2021
Derided for his acting, Arnold Schwarzenegger, nevertheless, made two classic action movies in his career: Terminator and Predator. Terminator, released in 1984, begins memorably with an apocalyptical vision of Los Angeles in 2024.
Yet, some commentators today have claimed that the future of urban warfare might approach this cinematic portend. They believe that in the future the urban battle will be fought not by humans but rather by robots and autonomous weapon systems directed by a super-intelligent computer. Some deplore this prospect– while others embrace it with millenarian enthusiasm, believing the machines will liberate humanity from the horror and waste of war. How accurate are these prognostications of urban warfare? Will the urban battle of the near future really look like those opening frames of Terminator?
It is worth noting that we have actually been in this situation before. In the 1920s and 1930s, many prominent military scientists made dire predictions about the future of warfare. Most famously, Guilio Douhet, Basil Liddell Hart and HG Wells all claimed that strategic airpower – the bomber – was about the revolutionise warfare. On the assumption that ‘the bomber would always get through’, they claimed that any future war would involve the immediate and total destruction of cities. The civilian population, which in Europe had escaped almost totally in the First World War, would become the target, indeed, the victim of an ineluctable new weapon: ‘There is no reason why within a few hours or at most days from the commencement of hostilities, the nerve system of a country inferior in air power should not be paralysed. Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall in a heap of ruins, the slum district maddened into impulse to break loose and maraud’.1
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