[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"gql:data:MONBxYgYEhGUyk6f2DwO_Kk0nVufpNZxVFSOnBQAUmQ":3,"gql:data:tyCI5HNt1HZczdKwWSz9r1bpaSHHrboaGtCGGtlkHBc":57,"gql:data:qmJY4-503CHlJg4_ZSHARjkzFPaXzbxV7BFMovCRKYg":129,"gql:data:kP29Z-cn6gozcKW_ctyaNxZTKb6d0zHC9C8nOXLH2f0":135,"gql:data:yxtepiAIgU6wIBqK3wYdgLRWg-QNgf2zDL8SSTsBMXA":141,"gql:data:P1L-3F4yLFT8Sm-6QpbQIoqRmZ3TevlXAnhvTQmaZho":150,"gql:data:HT7XK9L7FevXFqeorguiilMT3M34fS21-YSozsBn3eg":157,"gql:data:f4mhAPWlM5xN78vu5TWzJ9lGKobM-wA80_rd5hpD8Tk":192},{"globalSet":4},{"id":5,"handle":6,"heading":7,"image":8,"contacts":17,"address":28,"networks":35,"richSubtitle":52,"richText":54,"links":56},"2","identity","Ibraaz",[9],{"id":10,"path":11,"alt":12,"title":13,"width":14,"height":15,"mimeType":16},"47","building.png",null,"Building",1536,1024,"image/png",[18,23],{"title":19,"contactLink":20},"General",{"value":21,"defaultLabel":22},"mailto:enquiries@ibraaz.org","enquiries@ibraaz.org",{"title":24,"contactLink":25},"Press",{"value":26,"defaultLabel":27},"mailto:press@ibraaz.org","press@ibraaz.org",[29],{"title":30,"countryCode":31,"addressLine1":32,"addressLine2":12,"addressLine3":12,"locality":33,"postalCode":34},"Location","GB","93 Mortimer Street","London","W1W 7SS",[36,40,44,48],{"title":37,"path":38},"Instagram",{"url":39},"https://www.instagram.com/ibraazlondon/",{"title":41,"path":42},"Facebook",{"url":43},"https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61583823886627",{"title":45,"path":46},"YouTube",{"url":47},"https://www.youtube.com/@ibraazlondon",{"title":49,"path":50},"Bluesky",{"url":51},"https://bsky.app/profile/ibraaz.bsky.social",{"html":53},"\u003Cp>Opening hours\u003C/p>",{"html":55},"\u003Cp>Wed - Sun: 11am - 6pm\u003C/p>",[],{"globalSet":58},{"id":59,"handle":60,"linksGroups":61},"128","navigation",[62,68,99,105,111,117,123],{"title":63,"entry":64,"links":67},"What’s On",[65],{"uri":66},"whats-on",[],{"title":69,"entry":70,"links":73},"Publishing",[71],{"uri":72},"ibraaz-publishing",[74,79,84,89,94],{"title":75,"entry":76},"Writing Gaza",[77],{"uri":78},"ibraaz-publishing/writing-gaza",{"title":80,"entry":81},"Mission Statement",[82],{"uri":83},"ibraaz-publishing/mission-statement",{"title":85,"entry":86},"Read",[87],{"uri":88},"ibraaz-publishing/read",{"title":90,"entry":91},"Watch",[92],{"uri":93},"ibraaz-publishing/watch",{"title":95,"entry":96},"Listen",[97],{"uri":98},"ibraaz-publishing/listen",{"title":100,"entry":101,"links":104},"Visit Us",[102],{"uri":103},"visit-us",[],{"title":106,"entry":107,"links":110},"About Us",[108],{"uri":109},"about-us",[],{"title":112,"entry":113,"links":116},"Oula: Café-in-Residence",[114],{"uri":115},"oula-cafe",[],{"title":118,"entry":119,"links":122},"Maktaba: Bookshop-in-Residence",[120],{"uri":121},"maktaba-bookshop-in-residence",[],{"title":124,"entry":125,"links":128},"Contact Us",[126],{"uri":127},"contact-us",[],{"globalSet":130},{"id":131,"handle":132,"heading":12,"richText":133},"11","gdpr",{"html":134},"\u003Cp>We use cookies to give you the best experience. By clicking 'Accept' you consent to the use of all cookies. \u003Ca href=\"/privacy-policy\">Privacy Policy\u003C/a>.\u003C/p>",{"entries":136},[137],{"uri":138,"title":139,"typeHandle":140},"ibraaz-publishing/read/algorithmic-visions-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-warfare","Algorithmic Visions: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare","longForm",{"globalSet":142},{"id":143,"handle":144,"activated":145,"heading":146,"richText":147,"text":149},"16767","notification",false,"Visitor Information",{"html":148},"\u003Cp>Please note that our Majlis is currently closed and will reopen with our next exhibition in early July. The rest of the building is open so please do visit!\u003C/p>\u003Cp>\u003Cbr /> \u003C/p>","Got it",{"globalSet":151},{"id":152,"handle":153,"heading":154,"richText":155},"37","forms","Culture is a work in progress. Stay updated.",{"html":156},"\u003Cp>By subscribing to our newsletter you are agreeing to receiving updates and communications from Ibraaz.\u003C/p>",{"categories":158},[159,164,168,172,176,180,184,188],{"id":160,"slug":161,"title":162,"groupHandle":163},"4488","exhibitions","Exhibition","events",{"id":165,"slug":166,"title":167,"groupHandle":163},"4490","talks","Talk",{"id":169,"slug":170,"title":171,"groupHandle":163},"15579","music","Music",{"id":173,"slug":174,"title":175,"groupHandle":163},"4489","performance","Performance",{"id":177,"slug":178,"title":179,"groupHandle":163},"4492","film","Film",{"id":181,"slug":182,"title":183,"groupHandle":163},"6390","library-in-residence","Library-in-Residence",{"id":185,"slug":186,"title":187,"groupHandle":163},"18154","special-projects","Special Project",{"id":189,"slug":190,"title":191,"groupHandle":163},"18170","workshops","Workshop",{"entry":193},{"id":194,"uri":138,"title":139,"slug":195,"postDate":196,"typeHandle":140,"sectionHandle":197,"meta":198,"readCategories":201,"writeCategories":205,"missionCategories":206,"figure":207,"pdf":221,"authorInfo":222,"richTitle":227,"richSubtitle":12,"richDescription":229,"richExcerpt":12,"image":231,"externalLinks":233,"entrySections":234,"related":265},"5637","algorithmic-visions-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-warfare","2025-10-14T08:00:00+01:00","read",[199],{"title":139,"description":12,"image":200},[],[202],{"title":203,"slug":204},"Essay","essay",[],[],[208],{"typeHandle":209,"image":210,"caption":217,"width":219,"ratio":220},"figure",[211],{"id":212,"path":213,"alt":12,"title":214,"width":215,"height":216,"mimeType":16},"5794","Algorithmic-Visions-Artificial-Intelligence-and-the-Future-of-Warfare/Screenshot-2025-10-02-at-09.58.39.png","Screenshot 2025 10 02 at 09 58 39",1614,888,{"html":218},"\u003Cp>Copyright c/o ATPD (2025). Courtesy of the author.\u003C/p>","wide","landscape",[],[223],{"authorName":224,"authorBio":225},"Anthony Downey",{"html":226},"\u003Cp>\u003Cstrong>Anthony Downey\u003C/strong> is \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://pureportal.bcu.ac.uk/en/persons/anthony-downey-5/publications/?__cf_chl_tk=08AEqvijgH6ut77b.7v7yMQnllihszjPRMmbFYHS96w-1759504626-1.0.1.1-SkiyP1wJI.qO6SoHVab.cOtE1Z1qhmLM22.P1Qx1WoY\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Professor\u003C/a> of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (Birmingham City University). He sits on the editorial boards of \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.thirdtext.org/editors\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Ci>Third Text\u003C/i>\u003C/a> (Routledge), \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.palgrave.com/gp/journal/42984\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Ci>Digital War\u003C/i>\u003C/a>\u003Ci> \u003C/i>(Palgrave Macmillan), and \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/memory-mind-and-media/information/about-this-journal/editorial-board\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Ci>Memory, Mind & Media\u003C/i>\u003C/a> (Cambridge University Press), and is the series editor for \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://mitpress.mit.edu/author/anthony-downey-15455/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Research/Practice\u003C/a> (Sternberg and MIT Press). He recently completed \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://disabilityundersiege.bham.ac.uk/our-team/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Disability Under Siege\u003C/a>, a four-year £2.2 million Arts Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2021–25) project focused on securing educational and cultural provision for children with disabilities in Lebanon, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Jordan. \u003C/p>",{"html":228},"\u003Cp>Algorithmic Visions: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Warfare\u003C/p>",{"html":230},"\u003Cp>Anthony Downey examines how AI today has accelerated colonial ambitions into an all-encompassing neocolonial desire to not only forecast but also occupy the future.\u003C/p>",[232],{"id":212,"path":213,"alt":12,"title":214,"width":215,"height":216,"mimeType":16},[],[235,241,245,250,255,260],{"typeHandle":236,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":237,"richText":239},"content",{"html":238},"1",{"html":240},"\u003Cp>As the object of observation and scrutiny rather than the subject of communication, the so-called ‘Middle East’ has long served as a locus for applying, refining, and expanding colonial technologies of mapping.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">1\u003C/span> Established through cartographic, cadastral, photographic, and photogrammetric methods, these technologies mined information and projected meaning onto individuals, populations, and places. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the legacy of these technologies is readily identifiable in the neocolonial ambition to extract (mine) and extrapolate (project) data in the name of predefining, if not predetermining, future movements, incidents, risks, and dangers.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">2\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>To fully understand the implications of this, we need to observe two distinct but closely related points. To begin with, AI is a predictive mechanism devised to forecast future patterns. It employs inferential methods to ‘reason’, or project, from premises (data) to conclusions (projections). Over time, these projections frequently act as definitive revelations rather than, as they in fact are, inductions – that is, probabilistic forecasts of \u003Ci>potential\u003C/i> future events or patterns that have \u003Ci>yet to happen\u003C/i>.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">3\u003C/span>  \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Secondly, algorithmic projections, despite their propensity towards probabilistic inductions and so-called hallucinations (or, more accurately, errors), have acquired an insidious degree of diagnostic purposiveness. Imbued with an authority associated with a deceptive gloss of scientific objectivity, the operative logic of AI works towards generating solutions, or verdicts in the form of diagnoses. These prognostic and diagnostic methods are not abstractions insofar as they have a considerable impact on people and communities, nowhere more so than in zones of conflict. The impact generated by probabilistic inference (the event of targeting, for example) and diagnostic action (a missile strike) is all too visible in present-day cycles of data-centric warfare where information – extracted from and applied to specific topographies and communities – is used to eliminate perceived risks and threats.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">4\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>To the extent that the predictive and diagnostic capacity of AI today underwrites the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the use of Automated Target Recognition (ATR), and a pervasive reliance on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), we need to also observe the following: as a model of ‘algorithmic governance’ designed to manage and control populations and events, AI is a disciplinary technology.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">5\u003C/span> As evidenced in its cybernetic origins, its modus operandi has been historically geared towards both automation and ever more autonomous systems of decision-making designed to ‘govern’ future activity.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">6\u003C/span> When applied to military targeting, the regulative function of AI, a machinic contrivance geared towards prediction, seeks to prefigure future patterns of behaviour and activity in order to both control (govern) events and, in turn, eradicate perceived threats.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">7\u003C/span>\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":236,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":242,"richText":243},{"html":5},{"html":244},"\u003Cp>As a calculated approach to governing, or managing, people, communities, and topographies, the extraction and application of data is historically embedded in the instrumentalist archetypes of computational projection that we find in the expansionist ambitions of colonialism. If a place, object, or individual could be expressed numerically through cartographic coordinates, it not only bestowed a privileged command onto the colonial I/eye of the coloniser but also ensured that information could be operationalised and applied, however dubiously, to discipline subjects and dominate space. As Anne Godlewska points out, ‘[t]he emphasis on number and the \u003Ci>instrumentality of knowledge\u003C/i> has a strong association with cartography as mapping assigns a position to all places and objects. \u003Ci>That position can be expressed numerically\u003C/i>.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">8\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The martial instrumentalisation of numerical fixing, through cartographic means, in the context of data-centric warfare is demonstrably present in the AI-powered technologies we today associate with Wide Area Airborne Surveillance (WAAS) and Wide Areas Persistent Surveillance Systems (WAPSS). Through defining subjects as computationally compliant with an imperialist calculus of life, the techno-scientific resonance of numeric fixing (measuring) not only announces and sustains the authority of the colonial gaze, it strives to fix those subjects as passive data rather than active agents.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">9\u003C/span> When we consider these practices in light of the extractive logic of AI today, it is evident that – through the relentless mining of data – individuals can become co-opted into a technological apparatus that is essentially a means to ‘datafy’ and thereafter objectify them. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The datafication of individuals – a method to transform a living phenomenon into quantum data – submits the subject as a passive data point, registered in an opaque, recursive system of unaccountable algorithmic computation. The ascendancy of algorithmic governance thereafter heralds a vision of the subject (‘individuals’) as disaggregated data points (‘dividuals’) to be exploited for the purpose of computational profiling: ‘The algorithmic government knows (in)dividuals not as persons endowed with (real or supposed) capabilities of will and understanding, undergoing pain and pleasure but only as temporary aggregates of infra-personal data exploitable at an industrial scale.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">10\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The procedures associated with datafication – or \u003Ci>dividuation\u003C/i> – can be understood in terms of ‘data colonialism’, the latter involving a process whereby human activities are co-opted as data in the pursuit of governing them.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">11\u003C/span> ‘Algorithmic colonialism, driven by profit maximization at any cost, assumes that the human soul, behaviour, and action is raw material free for the taking. Knowledge, authority, and power to \u003Ci>sort\u003C/i>,\u003Ci> categorize\u003C/i>,\u003Ci> and order\u003C/i> human activity rests with the technologist, for which we are merely data producing “human natural resources”.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">12\u003C/span> In time, data, or digital artefacts, can be incrementally instrumentalised in the pursuit of ever more effective paradigms of manipulation and control: ‘As dynamic and interactive human activities and processes are automated, they are inherently simplified to the engineers’ and tech corporations’ subjective notions of what they mean. The \u003Ci>reduction of complex social problems\u003C/i> to a matter that can be “solved” by technology also treats people as passive objects for manipulation.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">13\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>As was the case in colonialism, the extraction of wealth – land, labour, and natural resources – segues, without any lessening of its overarching extractive command, into a neocolonial era focused on the mining of the quantifiable traces of people. How, one might therefore ask, has the ideological impetus of colonialism – a profoundly predatory and exploitative historical process – become indelibly hardwired into an inscrutable mechanical apparatus (AI) that underwrites the foundations of social, cultural, economic, and political life in an electronically connected world?\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":236,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":246,"richText":248},{"html":247},"3",{"html":249},"\u003Cp>Writing in his seminal volume \u003Ci>Orientalism\u003C/i>, Edward Said presciently observed that the function of the colonial gaze – and colonisation more broadly – was to ‘divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight (and \u003Ci>out of sight\u003C/i>)’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">14\u003C/span> This is an apt premonition of the algorithmic ‘vision’ we have come to associate with a neocolonial world order. Perpetuated by AI, this order strives to quarter, appropriate, realign, predict, and record everything in sight – and, critically, everything \u003Ci>out of sight\u003C/i>. In noting as much, I want to highlight here Said’s injunction against historical complacencies, in particular when he asserted ‘that the Orientalist reality is both anti-human and persistent. Its scope, as much as its institutions and all-pervasive influence, lasts up to the present’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">15\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>When considered alongside the reduction of future possibilities to the demands of neocolonialism, Orientalism’s legacy, the biased, anti-human and discursive production of the subaltern other, not only persists in our time but has mutated into an apparatus of conspicuous predation: through the unrelenting extraction of data and its dubious application, AI exploits ostensible patterns in data to predict and thereafter pre-empt (\u003Ci>govern\u003C/i>) future outcomes in the name of risk management. The presence of an anti-human sentiment is, likewise, exposed in the datafication of individuals, so much so that we now live in an era of ‘digital dehumanisation’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">16\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The logistics of extraction and the datafication of people– not to mention the violence perpetuated through such activities – was all too amply captured in Aimé Césaire’s succinct phrase: ‘colonisation = “thingification”’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">17\u003C/span> Through this resonant formulation, Césaire highlighted both the inherent processes of dehumanisation practised by colonial powers and how this sought to produce the docile and productive – that is, silenced, pacified, and commodified – body of the colonised. As befitted his time, Césaire understood the depradations of colonisation primarily in terms of wealth extraction (raw materials), the occupation of land, and the exploitation of physical, indentured labour. However, his thesis remains key to any understanding of how colonisation endeavours to project unmitigated control over the future, if only to pre-empt and extinguish elements that do not accord with the avowed aims and priorities of imperialism: ‘I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, \u003Ci>extraordinary\u003C/i> \u003Ci>possibilities\u003C/i> wiped out.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">18\u003C/span> The exploitation of raw materials, labour, and people, realised through the violent projections of western knowledge and power, employed a process of dehumanisation that deferred, if not truncated, the unlimited possibilities of future realities. \u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":236,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":251,"richText":253},{"html":252},"4",{"html":254},"\u003Cp>In the contemporary context of the ‘Middle East’, the imperative of threat prediction and the management of risk – the disavowal of future possibility in the name of pre-emptive war – is profoundly reliant on the deployment of AI. This was already discernible in 2003 when, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush announced: ‘If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">19\u003C/span> Implied in Bush’s statement, whether he intended it or not, was the unspoken assumption that counter-terrorism and the prosecution of future wars would be necessarily aided by semi- if not fully-autonomous weapons systems capable of maintaining and supporting the military strategy of anticipatory and preventative self-defence. To predict threat, this logic goes, you have to see further than the human eye and act quicker (anticipate) than the human brain; to pre-empt threat, to use Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous phrase, you have to be ready to determine and exclude (eradicate) the ‘unknown unknowns’, or that which remains ‘out of sight’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">20\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Although it is admittedly a historical mainstay of military tactics, the contemporary use of pre-emptive, or anticipatory, self-defence – the so-called Bush doctrine – is now understood to be one of the more questionable legacies of the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, without evidence of Iraqi involvement in the events of 9/11, was a pre-emptive war waged by the US and its erstwhile allies to militate against such attacks \u003Ci>in the future \u003C/i>and mitigate the domain of ‘unknown unknowns’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">21\u003C/span> In essence, it was a neocolonial war that, to recall Césaire’s earlier admonition of colonisation, ensured that societies, cultures, institutions, lands, religions, artistic creations were destroyed and the extraordinary fact of future \u003Ci>possibility\u003C/i> precipitously erased.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">22\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>In keeping with the ambition to predict ‘unknown unknowns’ in the name of national security, Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, wrote an opinion piece for the \u003Ci>New York Times\u003C/i> in July 2023.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">23\u003C/span> Karp’s summary of the continued dilemmas in the applications of AI systems in warfare, including the peril of machines that run amok, needs to be taken seriously insofar as he is one of the few with an insider’s insight into the future deployment of AI in data-centric warfare.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">24\u003C/span> Admitting that the most recent versions of AI, including so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) that have become increasingly popular in ChatGPT and other products, are impossible to understand for user and programmer alike, Karp freely accepted that what ‘has emerged from that trillion-dimensional space is \u003Ci>opaque and mysterious\u003C/i>’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">25\u003C/span> It would appear, however, that the ‘known unknowns’ of AI, the recursive opacities of its iterative logic (not to mention the demonstrable inclination towards erroneous predictions or outright hallucinations), can be nevertheless counted on to predict the ‘unknown unknowns’ associated with the forecasting of threat – at least, that is, in the sphere of the predictive simulations championed by Palantir and others in the ever-expanding sphere of data-centric warfare.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">26\u003C/span>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Widely seen as the leading proponent of AI and predictive analytics, Palantir seldom hesitates when it comes to advocating the expansion of these technologies in contemporary wars, policing, information management, and data analytics more broadly. In tune with its avowed ambition to see AI more fully incorporated into conflicts, its website is forthright on this matter. We learn, in relation to both AI and machine learning (ML) in general, that ‘new aviation modernization efforts extend the reach of Army intelligence, manpower and equipment to dynamically deter the threat at extended range. At Palantir, we deploy AI/ML-enabled solutions onto airborne platforms so that users can \u003Ci>see farther\u003C/i>, generate insights faster and react at the speed of relevance.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">27\u003C/span> We can only surmise what reacting ‘at the speed of relevance’ means here, but presumably it has to do with the pre-emptive martial logic of autonomously anticipating and eradicating, through the affordances of AI, future – real or imagined – before they become manifest.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">28\u003C/span> To do this, the technology needs to predict, if not exhaust, the future; it needs to manage the \u003Ci>extra\u003C/i>-ordinary possibility of events that have \u003Ci>yet to happen\u003C/i>.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Published 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, Karp’s article proposed that current threats to US security called for pre-emptive warfare. Incorporating as they do the prophetic, if not oracle-like, capacities of predictive systems, he further argued that the use of AI in warfare would ‘shape the international politics of this century in the way nuclear arms shaped the last one’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">29\u003C/span> It is not only the very ideal of an American future that is presently at stake, it would seem, but who controls the future as a quantifiable, \u003Ci>predictable\u003C/i> space that remains beholden to western interests.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":236,"richTitle":12,"richSubtitle":256,"richText":258},{"html":257},"5",{"html":259},"\u003Cp>Insofar as the predictive and diagnostic dimension of AI remains profoundly reliant on inequitable structures of suppression, silencing, and eradication, its disciplinary apparatus discloses an ‘epistemic violence’: the event of datafication not only seeks to predefine realities but silence voices and the agency of others according to the self-interested goals of neocolonialism.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">30\u003C/span> For all the professed viability, if not validity, of the AI apparatuses deployed in wide-area persistent surveillance systems (WAPSS) and autonomous weapons systems, we need to consistently foreground the degree to which ‘algorithms are political in the sense that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Speaking of algorithmic politics in this sense, then, refers to the idea that realities are never given but \u003Ci>brought into being\u003C/i> and \u003Ci>actualized\u003C/i> in and through algorithmic systems.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">31\u003C/span> \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The technological affordances of AI reveal, furthermore, the paradoxical capacity of predictive algorithms to provoke the very event they purport to augur. To this end, a ‘paradox arises from, on the one hand, the capacity of algorithms to make happen what they predict, and, on the other, that attempting to predict the future threatens to close its open horizon … a prediction that was intended to cope with the uncertainty of the future can quickly transform into a certainty that may turn out to be illusory’.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">32\u003C/span> Through unfettered access to data, systemic calculations, systematic training, algorithmic rationalisations, expanded infrastructures, and interconnected networks, AI has the capacity to not only predefine events that have \u003Ci>yet to happen\u003C/i> but summon forth a spectre of threat and danger, based on the political calculus of imminent risk, that can be then extinguished. In this mise en abyme, certain classes of data will be significantly overrepresented or underrepresented compared to others, thus ensuring that any bias in the data-labelling or training stage will be subjected to ‘algorithmic amplification’ in the output stage of prediction.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">33\u003C/span> Any prediction based on input data – for example, labelled images extracted from conflict zones – arguably stimulates computational exemplars of paranoiac projection in the pursuit of extra-terrestrial dominion and terrestrial dominance. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>In light of these points, the abiding, if not urgent, concern revolves around the extent to which a perceived threat, based on a recursive calculus performed by a machinic apparatus – that is, an AI – is invariably responded to as if it was an actual threat: ‘When self-fulfilling prophecies begin to proliferate, we risk returning to a deterministic worldview in which the future appears as predetermined and hence closed. The space vital to imagining what could be otherwise begins to shrink.’\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">34\u003C/span> When we consider that the algorithmically \u003Ci>perceived\u003C/i> event of ‘threat’ can be calculated, or summoned forth, then the nominal notion of ‘epistemic violence’ – which is often referred to as a means to silence or discount subaltern voices and agencies – finds an all too amenable counterpart in the extirpation, rather than \u003Ci>just\u003C/i> silencing, of the other. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The process of devolving decision-making processes – relating to questions of life and death – to autonomous, algorithmically augmented systems divulges a fatal link between colonial technologies and the opaque realm of unaccountable, AI-powered apparatuses. It also raises the question as to who, or what, is making decisions in data-centric warfare and the degree to which AI has become an alibi for mass annihilation.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">35\u003C/span> To accept, even in part, that the ambition to ‘see farther’ is contingent upon unfathomable apparatuses is to raise the question: what will be the future of death in an algorithmic age and who – or, more precisely, what – will get to decide its biopolitical and legal definitions? \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Palantir’s stated objective to produce predictive structures and AI solutions that enable military planners to ‘see farther’ is not only ample corroboration of its reliance on the inductive, or predictive, qualities of AI but, given its ascendant position in relation to the US government and the Pentagon, a clear indication of how such technologies will determine the prosecution and outcomes of future wars.\u003Cspan class=\"fn-marker\">36\u003C/span> This will no doubt further bolster a regime of algorithmic ‘truth’, an imaginative geography, or command, that will encode AI as a disciplinary technology capable of governing populations and occupying realities without having to actually occupy a territory with so-called ‘boots on the ground’. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>The ambition to see farther supports, finally, the neocolonial ambition to see that which \u003Ci>cannot be seen\u003C/i> – or, indeed, to see that which can only be seen \u003Ci>through\u003C/i> the calculus of the algorithmic gaze and its rationalisation of future realities. It is from within this phantasmal space of eternal menace – where the computation of a seemingly unsurpassable existential risk precipitates its summary eradication – that we can begin to see how the widespread use of algorithmically induced targets is designed to project threat, ad infinitum, into the (un)foreseeable future. Subject to martial, ideological, and algorithmic extrapolations, such futures would appear, for now at least, to be \u003Ci>pre\u003C/i>-occupied by technologies over which we have less and less control. These apprehensions, in our era of supposedly unending emergency (a convenient clarion call for unremitting forms of aerial surveillance), are far from regional. The subject of contemporary and future wars will be formulated in the shadow of these systems, and we will need to identify and distinguish, as a matter of due legal process, the ongoing impact of AI on the material realities of everyday life and, indeed, death.\u003C/p>",{"typeHandle":261,"title":262,"richText":263},"footnotes","Notes",{"html":264},"\u003Cp>Depending on who is using it, the boundaries and exact meaning of the term ‘Middle East’ shift according to geopolitical, historical, and political frames of reference (the latter being often expedient and self-serving), hence the use of scare quotes here. For this essay, I will direct most of my comments on colonial technologies of mapping towards the ‘Middle East’, which is not to discount the degree to which colonial technologies were applied more generally across the Global South and East Asia. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>I use the term artificial intelligence (AI) to define an apparatus that can – theoretically – perform tasks with a human-like intelligence and, in turn, recognise patterns, effect decisions, and solve problems independent of human input. More specifically, I am interested in the extent to which AI, contingent as it is on the algorithmic rationalisation of so-called Big Data to generate predictions, produces structures of epistemic violence that result in injury and death.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>This is often referred to as the ‘induction fallacy’. For an accessible account of algorithmic induction, see Pedro Domingos, \u003Ci>The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World\u003C/i>, Basic Books, 2015, 57–91.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>One of the more enduring legacies of the 2003 Iraq War involved a series of initiatives funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including the Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS). In 2006, ARGUS became the first airborne apparatus designed to calculate the future location of potential insurgents. For a full account of ARGUS and its deployment in Iraq, see Arthur Holland Michel, \u003Ci>Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of the Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Over Us All\u003C/i>, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The term ‘algorithmic governance’ is largely associated with the work of Antoinette Rouvroy. See, for example, Antoinette Rouvroy, ‘Algorithmic Governmentality: A Passion for the Real and the Exhaustion of the Virtual,’ conference abstract, Transmediale, Berlin, 2013: See also Antoinette Rouvroy and Thomas Berns, ‘Algorithmic Governmentality and Prospects of Emancipation Disparateness as a Precondition for Individuation Through Relationships?, trans. Elizabeth Carey-Libbrecht, \u003Ci>Réseaux\u003C/i>, vol. 177, no. 1, 2013, 163–96, \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://shs.cairn.info/journal-reseaux-2013-1-page-163?lang=en\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>https://shs.cairn.info/journal-reseaux-2013-1-page-163?lang=en\u003C/u>\u003C/a> .\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Cybernetics is largely associated with the pivotal work of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), whose work on feedback mechanisms was foundational to the evolution of machine learning and human-machine automation. The verb ‘govern’, in Wiener’s influential use of the term, broadly means to control, regulate, or \u003Ci>steer\u003C/i> a system’s behaviour through a series of feedback mechanisms. See Norbert Wiener, \u003Ci>Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machin\u003C/i>e, MIT Press, 2019. The book was first published in 1948.\u003C/p>\u003Cp> I have written at length on how the predictive, if not pre-emptive, functioning of AI drives the widespread use of LAWs, ATR, and UAVs across the Global South today. See, for example, Anthony Downey, ‘The Future of Death: Algorithmic Design, Predictive Analysis, and Drone Warfare’, in eds. Jen Bjering et al., \u003Ci>War and Aesthetics: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare\u003C/i>, MIT Press, 209–41.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Anne Godlewska, ‘Map, Text and Image – The Mentality of Enlightened Conquerors: A New Look at the Description de l’Egypte’, \u003Ci>Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers\u003C/i>, vol. 20, no. 1, 1995, 6. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The overdetermination, if not dehumanisation, of the colonised other through the ‘projections’ of the colonial gaze is key to \u003Ci>Black Skin, White Mask\u003C/i>s (1967), where Frantz Fanon observed how he was ‘overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance … I am \u003Ci>fixed\u003C/i>. Having adjusted their microtomes, they [the colonizer] objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare.’ Frantz Fanon, \u003Ci>Black Skin, White Mask\u003C/i>s, Pluto Press, 1986, 116.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Rouvroy, ‘Algorithmic Governmentality, 2. Rouvroy’s perception of the individual as ‘aggregates of infra-personal data’, and thereafter ‘dividuals’, is drawn from Gilles Deleuze’s observation that ‘individuals have become “\u003Ci>dividuals\u003C/i>,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “\u003Ci>banks\u003C/i>”.’ See Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, \u003Ci>October\u003C/i>, no. 59, 1992, 3–7 (5).\u003C/p>\u003Cp>See Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, \u003Ci>The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism\u003C/i>, Stanford University Press, 2019.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Abeba Birhane, ‘Algorithmic Colonization of Africa’, \u003Ci>SCRIPTed\u003C/i>, vol. 17, no. 2, August 2020, 391: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://script-ed.org/article/algorithmic-colonization-of-africa/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https://script-ed.org/article/algorithmic-colonization-of-africa/\u003C/a> . Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Birhane, 397. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Edward Said, \u003Ci>Orientalism\u003C/i>, Penguin 1991, 86. Emphasis added. The book was originally published in 1978.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Said, 44.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The term ‘digital dehumanisation’ is used by the Stop Killer Robots campaign to define ‘a process where humans are reduced to data, which is then used to make decisions and/or take actions that negatively affects their lives’. See ‘Digital Dehumanisation’, Stop Killer Robots, https://www.stopkillerrobots.org/stop-killer-robots/digital-dehumanisation/. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>Aimé Césaire, \u003Ci>Discourse on Colonialism\u003C/i>, trans. Joan Pinkham, \u003Ci>Monthly Review Press\u003C/i>, 2000, 42. The essay was originally published in 1950.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Césaire, 43. Emphasis in original.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>George W. Bush, ‘President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’, 1 June 2002: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html\u003C/u>\u003C/a> .\u003C/p>\u003Cp>The phrase ‘unknown unknowns’ was used by the then US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld when putting forth his argument for the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in 2003. For a transcription of Rumsfeld’s gnomic remarks, see ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://archive.ph/20180320091111/http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">News Transcript\u003C/a>’, White House, 12 February 2002.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Over a 10-year period, from 2003 onwards, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) proceeded to funnel an estimated $75 billion into projects relating to unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and autonomous weapons systems (AWS), albeit with varying degrees of success. Holland Michel, \u003Ci>Eyes in the Sky\u003C/i>, 13. Such apparatuses, in their panoptic ambitions, also brought about a further alignment between the logic of the pre-emptive strike in martial strategies – the demand, that is, to strike first in a theatre of war – and the in-built predictive, and increasingly anticipatory, logic that underwrites AI. For a fuller account of how these systems encoded the logic of pre-emptive war into the systemic functioning of AI, see Anthony Downey, ‘Algorithmic Predictions and Pre-emptive Violence: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Unmanned Aerial Systems’, \u003Ci>Digital War\u003C/i>, vol. 5, 2024, 123–33: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-023-00068-7\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-023-00068-7\u003C/a> .\u003C/p>\u003Cp>See Raymond W. Baker, Shereem T. Ismael, and Tareq Y. Ismael, eds., \u003Ci>Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered\u003C/i>, Pluto Press, 2010. This volume is one of the more important accounts of the profoundly far-reaching implications not only of destroying cultural artefacts but the long-term effect of a neo-imperial war upon the intellectual life and collective future of a country.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Alexander C. Karp, ‘Our Oppenheimer Moment: The Creation of A.I. Weapons’,\u003Ci> New York Times\u003C/i>, 25 July 2023: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/karp-palantir-artificial-intelligence.html\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/karp-palantir-artificial-intelligence.html\u003C/u>\u003C/a> .\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Palantir was originally funded by In-Q-Tel (IQT), the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) not-for-profit venture capital arm. Today, it is increasingly viewed as one of the leading companies trading in predictive data analytics and defence, as evidenced by the fact that the company was recently awarded US $250 million as part of a US Army AI research contract. In a recently published volume, Karp discussed at length the longer-term impact of Edward Said’s work and – while openly acknowledging Said's influence and continued relevance on contemporary debates related to neocolonisation – what he considers to be the erroneous conclusions of \u003Ci>Orientalism\u003C/i>. See Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, \u003Ci>The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West\u003C/i>, The Bodley Head, 2024, 83–96.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Ibid. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Palantir, alongside Anduril Industries, is one of the more high-profile companies involved in AI surveillance and data-centric warfare. The company’s name is derived from the seeing-stones, or ‘Palantíri’, in J. R. R. Tolkein’s epic tale \u003Ci>The Lord of the Rings\u003C/i> (1937). Similarly, Anduril, who were recently awarded a $22-billion-dollar contract to develop the US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), adopted its name from Tolkein’s tome, where it means ‘Flame of the West’. The latter is a reforged sword that – through evoking themes of renewal, strength, and decisive weaponry – is one of the mythical tools of war in \u003Ci>The Lord of the Rings.\u003C/i>\u003C/p>\u003Cp>See ‘Palantir for the US Army’, Palantir: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.palantir.com/offerings/defense/army/#airborne\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https://www.palantir.com/offerings/defense/army/#airborne\u003C/a>\u003Ci> . \u003C/i>Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>In a recent speech delivered to an unprecedented gathering of US generals at Quantico, Virginia, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed precisely such sentiments: ‘This is a moment of urgency, \u003Ci>mounting urgency\u003C/i>. Enemies gather. \u003Ci>Threats grow\u003C/i> … this urgent moment of course requires more troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriots, more submarines, more B-21 bombers. It requires more innovation, \u003Ci>more AI in everything \u003C/i>and ahead of the curve, more cyber effects, more counter UAS, more space, \u003Ci>more speed\u003C/i>.’ Secretary of War Pete Hegseth \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.war.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/4318689/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-addresses-general-and-flag-officers-at-quantico-v/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Addresses General and Flag Officers at Quantico\u003C/a>, Virginia. US Department of War, 30 September 2025. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Karp, ‘Our Oppenheimer Moment’.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>In her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak developed the term ‘epistemic violence’ to address how colonial discourse silences, erases, and mediates subaltern voices, particularly those of women. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in \u003Ci>Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture\u003C/i>, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press. 271–313.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Taina Bucher, \u003Ci>If ... Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics\u003C/i>, Oxford University Press, 2018, 3. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Helga Nowotny, \u003Ci>In AI We Trust: Power, Illusion and the Control of Predictive Algorithms\u003C/i>, Polity Press, 2021, 50–51. Emphasis added. \u003C/p>\u003Cp>For a discussion of ‘algorithmic amplification’, see Renee DiResta, ‘Computational Propaganda: Public Relations in a High-Tech Age’, \u003Ci>Wired\u003C/i>, 30 August 2018: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://yalereview.org/article/computational-propaganda\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003Cu>https://yalereview.org/article/computational-propaganda\u003C/u>\u003C/a> .\u003C/p>\u003Cp>Nowotny, \u003Ci>In AI We Trust\u003C/i>, 50. Emphasis added.\u003C/p>\u003Cp>For an extended discussion of the use of predictive AI and ATR in Gaza since at least 2023, see Anthony Downey, ‘The Alibi of AI: Algorithmic Models of Automated Killing’, \u003Ci>Digital War\u003C/i>, vol. 6, no. 9, 16 June 2025: \u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-025-00105-7\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s42984-025-00105-7\u003C/a> . \u003C/p>\u003Cp>In January 2024, it was announced that Palantir had agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israel Ministry of Defense to supply its predictive technologies. See Marissa Newman, ‘\u003Ca target=\"_blank\" href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-israel-agree-to-strategic-partnership-for-battle-tech?leadSource=uverify%20wall\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Thiel’s Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech\u003C/a>’, \u003Ci>Bloomberg News\u003C/i>, 12 January 2024.\u003C/p>",[266],{"title":267,"relatedEntries":268},"Related",[269,290,309],{"typeHandle":270,"entries":271},"channelsEntries",[272],{"title":273,"uri":274,"image":275,"readCategories":283,"writeCategories":285,"missionCategories":286,"authorInfo":287},"Opacity as Resistance: Reversing the Image Politics of Empire","ibraaz-publishing/read/opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire",[276],{"id":277,"path":278,"alt":12,"title":279,"width":280,"height":281,"mimeType":282},"6021","opacity-as-resistance-reversing-the-image-politics-of-empire/Fig.-8-Troops-carrying-a-dummy-Stuart-tank-3-April-1942.jpg","Fig 8 Troops carrying a dummy Stuart tank 3 April 1942",798,800,"image/jpeg",[284],{"title":203,"slug":204},[],[],[288],{"authorName":289},"Heba Y. Amin",{"typeHandle":270,"entries":291},[292],{"title":293,"uri":294,"image":295,"readCategories":302,"writeCategories":304,"missionCategories":305,"authorInfo":306},"Borders as Algorithms as Borders","ibraaz-publishing/read/borders-as-algorithms-as-borders",[296],{"id":297,"path":298,"alt":12,"title":299,"width":300,"height":301,"mimeType":282},"25623","Matt-Mahmoudi-essay/main_image56486_B3fCHC2ZN4.JPG","Main image56486 B3f CHC2 ZN4",5760,3840,[303],{"title":203,"slug":204},[],[],[307],{"authorName":308},"Matt Mahmoudi",{"typeHandle":310,"events":311},"calendarEvents",[312],{"title":313,"slug":314,"startDate":315,"endDate":316,"datesText":317,"image":319,"categories":326,"heading":328},"Technology & Power 002","technology-and-power-002","2025-11-12T18:30:00+00:00","2025-11-12T20:00:00+00:00",{"html":318},"\u003Cp>Wednesday 12 Nov, 6:30–8pm\u003C/p>",[320],{"id":321,"path":322,"alt":12,"title":323,"width":324,"height":325,"mimeType":282},"13135","technology-and-power-002/Breaking-out-of-the-network_cover2.jpg","Breaking out of the network cover2",748,534,[327],{"title":167,"slug":166},"Alia Al Ghussain and Matt Mahmoudi, hosted by Jaya Klara Brekke"]