What do you think?
Rate this book
Strategy, Evolution, and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence
Decisions about war have always been made by humans, but now intelligent machines are on the cusp of changing things – with dramatic consequences for international affairs. This book explores the evolutionary origins of human strategy, and makes a provocative argument that Artificial Intelligence will radically transform the nature of war by changing the psychological basis of decision-making about violence.
Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last three thousand years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare—a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.
The implications of AI are profound because they depart radically from the biological basis of human intelligence. Rather than being just another tool of war, AI will dramatically speed up decision making and use very different cognitive processes, including when deciding to launch an attack, or escalate violence. AI will change the essence of strategy, the organization of armed forces, and the international order.
This book is a fascinating examination of the psychology of strategy-making from prehistoric times, through the ancient world, and into the modern age.
Strategy, Evolution, and War is a cautionary preview of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will revolutionize strategy more than any development in the last three thousand years of military history. Kenneth Payne describes strategy as an evolved package of conscious and unconscious behaviors with roots in our primate ancestry. Our minds were shaped by the need to think about warfare—a constant threat for early humans. As a result, we developed a sophisticated and strategic intelligence.
The implications of AI are profound because they depart radically from the biological basis of human intelligence. Rather than being just another tool of war, AI will dramatically speed up decision making and use very different cognitive processes, including when deciding to launch an attack, or escalate violence. AI will change the essence of strategy, the organization of armed forces, and the international order.
This book is a fascinating examination of the psychology of strategy-making from prehistoric times, through the ancient world, and into the modern age.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 1, 2018
6 people are currently reading
89 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 8, 2019
The essence of strategy is the infliction of pain to cause a change in the political choices of others. Yet it’s remarkable how often this fades into the background in mainstream writing about strategy. Many pieces propose significant effort, money and risks without ever discussing how well, and why, these actions will cause the intended change sought.
In Strategy, Evolution and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence, Kenneth Payne tackles this issue head on. He takes an evolutionary lens to the question of how humans think about and conduct strategy. He argues for three distinct styles. The prehistoric where the development of large and enduring social groups to conduct warfare distinguished humans from apes. The cultural shift which emerged through writing and covers from the Ancient Greeks to the nuclear age. Finally the potential revolution of Artificial Intelligence where machines will do the strategic thinking for us – albeit in unsettlingly different ways.
Among the proliferation of books about AI and warfare, this is a really interesting and useful approach because it helps keep the focus on the purpose of strategy (how pain causes political outcomes) rather than the form (weapon types, intensity of conflict, etc). This framework and orientation for the book is its great strength. The authors depth of reading in strategy, psychology and evolutionary theory is also evident and provides useful guides and insights to these vast fields.
In covering virtually all of human history, and advancing several arguments at once, the book sometimes tries to do too much. It was not always clear the main argument or how sections relate. Payne argues for the importance of psychology for strategy, role of evolution in changing that psychology, relationship of technology, material size and culture in strategy, challenge of AI’s emergence, and more – and that’s just the headline sections.
My other concern is one which may be based no more on a sense that had I written the book, I’d have done it differently, so this is cautiously advanced. It concerns the choices of cases for the culture section. We get 3 detailed chapters to cover the 2500 years of ‘modern’ humans, built upon the contributions of three first rate strategic thinkers, Thucydides, Clausewitz and Schelling. Covering such a broad sweep via these three eras is analogous to making your way along a street by only looking at the ground under three very bright, but very separated street lights. Yes they illuminate specific moments, but it feels like major changes were left out.
Even if in evolutionary terms humans didn’t change much, in philosophical terms they did. So the Ancient Greeks did not think of their relationship to their own society or outsiders in anything like the way we do today, and had no real concept of the individual as we do. Yet these issues are fundamental to how we conduct strategic practice. Likewise we hear more about Clausewtiz’s romantic rebellion to the enlightenment, even though modern strategy, from Machiavelli to the so-called 'Revolution in Military Affairs' is very much an enlightenment project – or at least popular understood and practiced as such. The book can’t cover everything, and I know I’ve just jabbed it above for trying to do too much, but by choosing to focus so intently on a few well-lit sections, key twists and turns in the road sometimes seemed obscured.
Overall, this is an engaging, smart and praiseworthy book. It reminds strategists that for all the effort we put into the form of strategy (what to do, against whom and what tools we use etc) the purpose of strategy (creating political change via organised violence) must be at the forefront of all our efforts. Human psychology is a key element of this, and by placing the emergence of AI in the broadest context of human evolution, Payne has provided a valuable service.
In Strategy, Evolution and War: From Apes to Artificial Intelligence, Kenneth Payne tackles this issue head on. He takes an evolutionary lens to the question of how humans think about and conduct strategy. He argues for three distinct styles. The prehistoric where the development of large and enduring social groups to conduct warfare distinguished humans from apes. The cultural shift which emerged through writing and covers from the Ancient Greeks to the nuclear age. Finally the potential revolution of Artificial Intelligence where machines will do the strategic thinking for us – albeit in unsettlingly different ways.
Among the proliferation of books about AI and warfare, this is a really interesting and useful approach because it helps keep the focus on the purpose of strategy (how pain causes political outcomes) rather than the form (weapon types, intensity of conflict, etc). This framework and orientation for the book is its great strength. The authors depth of reading in strategy, psychology and evolutionary theory is also evident and provides useful guides and insights to these vast fields.
In covering virtually all of human history, and advancing several arguments at once, the book sometimes tries to do too much. It was not always clear the main argument or how sections relate. Payne argues for the importance of psychology for strategy, role of evolution in changing that psychology, relationship of technology, material size and culture in strategy, challenge of AI’s emergence, and more – and that’s just the headline sections.
My other concern is one which may be based no more on a sense that had I written the book, I’d have done it differently, so this is cautiously advanced. It concerns the choices of cases for the culture section. We get 3 detailed chapters to cover the 2500 years of ‘modern’ humans, built upon the contributions of three first rate strategic thinkers, Thucydides, Clausewitz and Schelling. Covering such a broad sweep via these three eras is analogous to making your way along a street by only looking at the ground under three very bright, but very separated street lights. Yes they illuminate specific moments, but it feels like major changes were left out.
Even if in evolutionary terms humans didn’t change much, in philosophical terms they did. So the Ancient Greeks did not think of their relationship to their own society or outsiders in anything like the way we do today, and had no real concept of the individual as we do. Yet these issues are fundamental to how we conduct strategic practice. Likewise we hear more about Clausewtiz’s romantic rebellion to the enlightenment, even though modern strategy, from Machiavelli to the so-called 'Revolution in Military Affairs' is very much an enlightenment project – or at least popular understood and practiced as such. The book can’t cover everything, and I know I’ve just jabbed it above for trying to do too much, but by choosing to focus so intently on a few well-lit sections, key twists and turns in the road sometimes seemed obscured.
Overall, this is an engaging, smart and praiseworthy book. It reminds strategists that for all the effort we put into the form of strategy (what to do, against whom and what tools we use etc) the purpose of strategy (creating political change via organised violence) must be at the forefront of all our efforts. Human psychology is a key element of this, and by placing the emergence of AI in the broadest context of human evolution, Payne has provided a valuable service.
November 28, 2019
Another good man helping Humanity get rid of those toxic trees and their effects on the Atmospheric chemistry. Payne produces a very important work. After many interviews with the Apes and reading all the prehistoric letters and political writings, here it is. Sadly, Payne seems to understand less about the AI, than about the Apes, but probably he knows a lot more about Santa Claus than about the Apes.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews