entire book - Chris Hables Gray

The Uses of Science
Chapter Four
By accepting the machine as his model, and a single
unifying mind as the source of absolute order, Descartes in
effect brought every manifestation of life, ultimately, under
rational, centrally directed control—rational, that is,
provided one did not look too closely at the nature and
intentions of the controller. In doing so, he set a fashion in
thought that was to prevail with increasing success for the
next three centuries.
—Lewis Mumford (1970, Vol. 2, p. 98)
Consciousness is an overrated concept.
—Marvin Minsky (1989, p. 58)
without science, contemporary war would be impossible. And as
machine metaphors dominate war so they do science, although now the
machine is clearly a computer, an information processor. This is probably the
central theme technoscience has reinforced in the military, and in its
variations this is the main point of this chapter. But it is complicated. At the
heart of most dreams for absolute information there is the ideal of pure
intelligence, of artificial intelligence. It is a pervasive and peculiar version of
ration-ality that is masculine, mathematical, emotionless, and instrumentalist.
To understand late-twentieth-century war is to understand how this
rationality has shaped technoscience. Starting with the very specific
subfield of artificial intelligence, this chapter will track through various
definitions and metarules of working science to try to reveal something
of how they shape war's discourse and why technoscience, war, and
certain specific (and currently dominant) versions of rationality share
such an affinity. Since the situation of postmodernity frames technoscience
now, a discussion of science's role in various versions of postmodernism
ends the chapter.
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