the way of the world…”
We visited the dressing room, which was full of rustling skirts and lingerie and women busy with scissors and tape measures, not very attractive but then they were only live, and I said goodbye to Engineer Paridon, who accompanied me to the parking lot. Tottentanz and Blahouse were strangely quiet on the way back. I didn’t feel like talking either. The day, however, was not finished.
On my return home I found a fat envelope in my mailbox. It contained a book with the title The Unhumanization of Weapon Systems in the Twenty-first Century or Upside-down Evolution. The author’s name, Meslant, told me nothing. It was a heavy book, full of graphs and tables. Having nothing better to do, I sat down and began to read. On the first page, before the introduction, was an epigraph in German:
Aus Angst und Not
Das Heer ward tot .
—Eugen von Wahnzenstein
The author presented himself as an expert in contemporary military history. His subject, the new pacifism at the close of the twentieth century: it was prosperity and cowardice that gave birth to the unhumanization of war. People were increasingly reluctant to be fired upon, and this loss of martial spirit was directly proportional to the standard of living. The youth of wealthy nations weren’t interested in the noble motto Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. And it was just at that time that prices began falling in the intellectronics industry. Microprocessing elements called chips were replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes, mainly Silicobacterium logicum wieneri, named after the father of cybernetics. A handful of these elements cost no more than a handful of barley. Thus artificial intelligence grew cheap, yet the price of new weapons increased geometrically. In the first world war a plane cost as much as a car, in the second as much as twenty, and by the end of the century it was six hundred times more. It was calculated that in seventy years a superpower would be able to afford from eighteen to twenty-two planes. The falling curve of the cost of intelligence and the rising curve of the cost of weapons intersected, and at that point began the unhumanization of the armies. The military became unliving. At which juncture the world went through two crises. The first was when the price of oil soared, the second when shortly thereafter it plunged. The classic rules of economics went out the window, but few understood what was happening, or that the image of a soldier in uniform and helmet charging with bayonet was becoming as distant as the medieval knight in armor. Out of inertia the engineers continued to make big-gauge weapons for a while: tanks, cannon, carriers, and other fighting machines to be used by men, though already these could have gone into battle themselves, without them. Then followed a phase of accelerated miniaturization. Until now all weaponry had been fashioned to fit man: Tailored to his anatomy and physiology, so that he could kill and be killed.
As is usually the case in history, no one saw what lay ahead, for the discoveries which were to make possible the unhumanization of weapons took place in fields of science far from one another. Intellectronics produced microcomputers as cheap as grass, and neuroentomology finally solved the riddle of social insects who live and work together, communicating in their own language, even though bees, for example, have a nervous system 380,000 times smaller than a human brain. The intelligence of a bee is quite sufficient for a foot soldier, as military prowess and intelligence are two different things, at least on the battlefield. The major factor in the push for miniaturization was the atom bomb. The need to miniaturize came from simple facts, but facts that lay outside the military knowledge of the day. Seventy million years ago a huge meteor hit Earth and chilled its climate for centuries, making the dinosaurs defunct but hardly
We visited the dressing room, which was full of rustling skirts and lingerie and women busy with scissors and tape measures, not very attractive but then they were only live, and I said goodbye to Engineer Paridon, who accompanied me to the parking lot. Tottentanz and Blahouse were strangely quiet on the way back. I didn’t feel like talking either. The day, however, was not finished.
On my return home I found a fat envelope in my mailbox. It contained a book with the title The Unhumanization of Weapon Systems in the Twenty-first Century or Upside-down Evolution. The author’s name, Meslant, told me nothing. It was a heavy book, full of graphs and tables. Having nothing better to do, I sat down and began to read. On the first page, before the introduction, was an epigraph in German:
Aus Angst und Not
Das Heer ward tot .
—Eugen von Wahnzenstein
The author presented himself as an expert in contemporary military history. His subject, the new pacifism at the close of the twentieth century: it was prosperity and cowardice that gave birth to the unhumanization of war. People were increasingly reluctant to be fired upon, and this loss of martial spirit was directly proportional to the standard of living. The youth of wealthy nations weren’t interested in the noble motto Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. And it was just at that time that prices began falling in the intellectronics industry. Microprocessing elements called chips were replaced by corn, the product of the genetic engineering of a culture of artificial microbes, mainly Silicobacterium logicum wieneri, named after the father of cybernetics. A handful of these elements cost no more than a handful of barley. Thus artificial intelligence grew cheap, yet the price of new weapons increased geometrically. In the first world war a plane cost as much as a car, in the second as much as twenty, and by the end of the century it was six hundred times more. It was calculated that in seventy years a superpower would be able to afford from eighteen to twenty-two planes. The falling curve of the cost of intelligence and the rising curve of the cost of weapons intersected, and at that point began the unhumanization of the armies. The military became unliving. At which juncture the world went through two crises. The first was when the price of oil soared, the second when shortly thereafter it plunged. The classic rules of economics went out the window, but few understood what was happening, or that the image of a soldier in uniform and helmet charging with bayonet was becoming as distant as the medieval knight in armor. Out of inertia the engineers continued to make big-gauge weapons for a while: tanks, cannon, carriers, and other fighting machines to be used by men, though already these could have gone into battle themselves, without them. Then followed a phase of accelerated miniaturization. Until now all weaponry had been fashioned to fit man: Tailored to his anatomy and physiology, so that he could kill and be killed.
As is usually the case in history, no one saw what lay ahead, for the discoveries which were to make possible the unhumanization of weapons took place in fields of science far from one another. Intellectronics produced microcomputers as cheap as grass, and neuroentomology finally solved the riddle of social insects who live and work together, communicating in their own language, even though bees, for example, have a nervous system 380,000 times smaller than a human brain. The intelligence of a bee is quite sufficient for a foot soldier, as military prowess and intelligence are two different things, at least on the battlefield. The major factor in the push for miniaturization was the atom bomb. The need to miniaturize came from simple facts, but facts that lay outside the military knowledge of the day. Seventy million years ago a huge meteor hit Earth and chilled its climate for centuries, making the dinosaurs defunct but hardly
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