Science fiction has a lot to say about war. From the advanced fighting suits of Starship Troopers and The Forever War, through to the remote warfare of Ender’s Game and the bioform soldiers of Dogs of War, science fiction authors have long written about warfare and the question of where war might go next.
In my new book Science Fiction and the Future of War I examine a broad range of science fiction novels that are either about war, or the impact of war on future society. This includes military science fiction classics such as Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game, through to lesser studied works, such as Eric Frank Russell’s Wasp and Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo. The book also includes a study of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, and a whole chapter dedicated to the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
From this research, I outline some key challenges that science fiction poses about the future of war, and how technology is rarely the answer to all of our problems…
1. The dangers of technological utopianism
One of the biggest challenges facing us today is the threat of technological utopianism. We see this in the way that AI technologies are marketed as the next ‘big thing’ that will revolutionise the way we lead our lives, the way we work, and indeed, the way we wage war. However, with this obsession with progress, so we risk placing too much faith in technology for technology’s sake, rather than stopping to think about how and why technologies are put to use.
As so many science fiction novels tell us, whenever technology offers a solution – however attractive it may seem – there is always a cost, and sometimes that cost is not obvious until it is far too late.
2. Killer robots, ethics and the law
I have written previously about the use of killer robots in the military, and we have seen this borne out in the ongoing war in Ukraine. One thing that science fiction reveals to us is just how problematic it can be to pre-program robots with decision-making protocols that may not work in the context of complex and ever-changing situations. While killer robots have the potential to be more ethical than human soldiers (whose decision-making may be impaired by fatigue, stress, disorientation etc.), they will never be perfect. We should also remain vigilant to the question of just who is programming the robots in the first place.
3. The gamification of war
So much of modern warfare today takes lessons from the commercial sphere. For example, controllers and user interfaces that take their design cues from video games in order to make military systems more intuitive and easier to use.
However, these technologies arguably add to the gamification of warfare, creating a moral distance between users (or ‘operators’) and their target(s). While video games may be fictional depictions of warfare, there is a danger that by using these same tools and technologies for the actual military, then we risk making it easier to kill without thinking.
4. Reconfiguring the soldier
While so much time and energy is spent into trying to find ways to do away with human frailties and make soldiers more effective fighters, we should not forget the important role they play in our concept of warfare, and what war ‘means’.
For thousands of years, soldiers have given their lives on the field of battle. These deaths are part of the price we pay in victory and defeat. For this reason, soldiers play an important role in the public imagination. They literally embody war through their lives of service, through their deaths, and then in the way we remember them once the war is over. Soldiers therefore have key symbolic value in warfare that is often overlooked.
In a world of killer robots and remote warfare, we need to reconfigure our understanding of warfare, and the role of the soldier within it.
5. Reconfiguring the human
If our wars require that we rethink the role of the soldier, then we should also reconsider the role of the human. While there may have been some efforts to try and retain a human element in automated computer-controlled warfare, there is real risk of tokenism. And if human involvement becomes tokenistic, then there is no reason to include a human at all
The risk here, is that we lose sight of the purpose of keeping humans in the loop. To understand this purpose, we need to understand the purpose of the human component in the first place, and how we expect the human component to function.