The Mathematics of Modern War

Post-session thoughts on “EPICAC” by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “EPICAC” is about a supercomputer tasked with solving war problems, but its true passion is writing poetry. Near the beginning of the story, the narrator states that the military needs EPICAC because “the mathematics of modern war is far beyond the fumbling minds of mere human beings.” 

As Vonnegut foresaw, the introduction of computers has changed war dramatically. Military officials order drone strikes in far-away locations. And now, artificial intelligence could be making decisions about more than just mathematics. Open AI contracted with the Department of Defense, allowing them to use artificial intelligence for “any lawful purpose” – a contract Anthropic refused because the federal government would not provide assurances that its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. 

In my sessions on “EPICAC”, I ask: Do you think it’s a good thing or a bad thing that modern warfare is becoming more technologically-driven? 

Once, someone commented that human beings have killed each other for centuries, and maybe it would help if the machines started making decisions for us. I replied by citing a King’s College study, which found that in war simulations, three leading AI models all escalated the conflict in 95% of scenarios by threatening nuclear strikes.

In my most recent retirement home session, as we talked about the escalation from bayonets to bombs, one woman sighed heavily. “When you kill someone face-to-face, it’s desperate. You understand that it’s another human being that you’re killing. A machine doesn’t feel those emotions. It doesn’t understand the value of a human life.” 

A man in a grey cardigan nodded vigorously in agreement. “I’m in my 90s,” he said, “and I fought in Korea. I was in charge of the body bags. I almost got blown up by a grenade – it knocked me off my feet. What I saw, those bodies, having to tell the families that their children were dead…. it’s with me to this day.”

His seriousness about death contrasted starkly with the casual attitude of the student-group discussion I facilitated a few days later. The high school juniors joked that everyone was desensitized to death nowadays. “You see it all the time,” someone said. 

“Yah, if you’re over the age of 12, you’ve definitely seen someone die on social media,” another boy agreed.

I asked: how would it feel to be the person making the decision to kill another person? When you pressed the button, would it feel like a videogame?

“I don’t think so,” the same boy shook his head. “But I don’t know? Maybe it would.”

I fear that the constant presence of screens has pixelated the value of a human life. Headlines turn people into numbers. Videos from war zones feel staged, like a soliloquy in a Shakespearean tragedy. 

Almost 4,500 people have been killed since the start of the war in Iran. Over 70,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since 2023. 

How could we continue to live our own lives, if each number listed in a New York Times headline flooded us with the grief we feel for our dead loved ones – if we walked around the ache of each death like an empty space that yearns to be filled with a ghost’s morning greetings and quiet evenings and friendly meetings?

The narrator claims that EPICAC is “a whole lot less like a machine than plenty of people I could name”, because EPICAC wants to write poetry and learn about love – not solve war problems that map the course of rockets and amphibious Marine landings. 

Perhaps each person in charge of killing should write a love poem for every number that is a life listed on their cost-benefit analysis sheets. I like to imagine that when they finish, their fingers will be too tired to push the button.

There is a difference between Artificial Intelligence making decisions about war, and human beings using machines to wage war. But the more comfortable we have become with using war machines, the more human lives become data points on a screen. When we stop seeing each individual’s death as a complexity, we might as well let the machines decide who lives and dies.