THE reverberations of the Iran war are being felt around the world. In Pakistan, the government has hiked fuel prices, which will mean higher prices for all commodities. School schedules are being shortened and people are finding it harder to ignore the bill that the US-Israel war on Iran has handed them. Similar difficulties are being faced by other countries across the region. All eyes are on the April 6 deadline the US has given Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.

By now, nearly every aspect of the war — strategic interests, failures and the costly regional fallout — has been analysed at length. Less discussed has been the role of artificial intelligence used by the US to decide on targets and provide predictions. Perceived through this lens, the dynamics of the war were decided not on Feb 28, when it began, but rather on Jan 9, when the US secretary of war issued a memo in which he noted seven projects that would make the US military “an AI first war fighting force across all components from front to back”.

This strategy required the compression of timelines of years into months. It prescribed that the military opt for the speed of implementation of AI models at the risk of imperfect........

© Dawn