Brad Allenby’s latest book explores the impacts of technological advances on human conflict — impacts that he says are making the world more complex, interconnected and dangerous.
Allenby is an ASU President’s Professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering in the Fulton Schools, and Professor of Engineering and Ethics in ASU’s Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics. He’s also founding chair of the Consortium for Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security.
His book, “The Rightful Place of Science: Future Conflict & Emerging Technologies,” has just been published by ASU’s Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes.
Technology is radically reshaping the world’s geopolitical environment, Allenby writes, as the very scope and definition of conflict is being destabilized by adversaries who take advantage of new technologies, from the use of autonomous military robots with lethal capabilities to the digital tools of cyber conflict.
He points to the fact that nations were once the dominant players on the world stage, but that today non-state forces — including terrorist groups and corporations — now compete for global power with tools that in the past were available only to national governments.
He looks at how these trends are transforming the realm of military defense and security strategy and making familiar institutions and traditional approaches to conflict obsolete.
The book is Allenby’s attempt to encourage the deeper understanding of the shifting dynamics of modern conflict that will be necessary to negotiate an increasingly hazardous landscape.
