The rapid shift of AI into the domain of national security is frequently portrayed as a foregone conclusion. It’s not, and we shouldn’t treat it like that.
re. the internet not being securitised: you could even make the point that digital network technologies were born military, but became gradually de-securitised over time even as their military benefits became more obvious (e.g. Network-Centric Warfare in Desert Shield), simply because their commercial and civilian benefits ballooned even more rapidly.
The same desecuritizing dynamic applied to e.g. early internet systems trialled by the Soviets, which shifted from 1950s-1960s military trials to broader tech programs intended to help in managing the economy, supported by cybernetics enthusiasts and mathematical economists --before eventually fizzling ( https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510802044736 )
the securitisation dynamic here is also interesting to consider against previous instances of self-fulfilling dynamics affecting international politics, both in (arguably) beneficial directions: e.g. Democratic Peace Theory and Commercial Peace Theory only ended up developing an empirical record in support after the theories became popular (for likely political and ideological reasons);* in the early '00s, there were similar debates that Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' might have become one (perhaps it did).
That may get especially tricky when these predictions are made at the interface of political and technological trends though--
re. the internet not being securitised: you could even make the point that digital network technologies were born military, but became gradually de-securitised over time even as their military benefits became more obvious (e.g. Network-Centric Warfare in Desert Shield), simply because their commercial and civilian benefits ballooned even more rapidly.
The same desecuritizing dynamic applied to e.g. early internet systems trialled by the Soviets, which shifted from 1950s-1960s military trials to broader tech programs intended to help in managing the economy, supported by cybernetics enthusiasts and mathematical economists --before eventually fizzling ( https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510802044736 )
Moreover, there are a bunch of other technologies that were abandoned for various reasons by military planners that were more conservative and cautious about the theatre-readiness of moonshot technologies (see also the overview at: https://verfassungsblog.de/paths-untaken/ , or pg 27 onwards in this talk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Oo2sHGYN5os5VoSBgP8wDXBQThSIzrFh/view?usp=drive_link ).
the securitisation dynamic here is also interesting to consider against previous instances of self-fulfilling dynamics affecting international politics, both in (arguably) beneficial directions: e.g. Democratic Peace Theory and Commercial Peace Theory only ended up developing an empirical record in support after the theories became popular (for likely political and ideological reasons);* in the early '00s, there were similar debates that Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' might have become one (perhaps it did).
That may get especially tricky when these predictions are made at the interface of political and technological trends though--
---
* https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/11/3/552/1798000
** http://cadmus.eui.eu//handle/1814/17458
(explored some of this in chapter 5 of my undergraduate thesis https://www.academia.edu/8007823/The_Forging_of_Our_Futures_The_Temporal_Construction_of_Political_Logics_the_Performative_Self-Fulfillment_of_Prophetic_Visions_and_the_Need_for_a_Post-Positivist_Transformational_Idealism_in_IR )