CONCEPT
Military-Industrial Origins of Computing
The institutional genealogy tracing how AI's foundational technologies—from ENIAC to neural networks—emerged from military funding and carried military values (efficiency, control, optimization) into civilian applications.
Computing did not emerge from the garage. Smith's research on military enterprise as technological catalyst extends into the institutional origins of artificial intelligence, revealing that virtually every foundational computing technology—electronic computation, packet-switched networking, time-sharing systems, the algorithms underlying contemporary AI—was developed in military or military-adjacent research institutions responding to strategic imperatives, not market demand. ENIAC calculated artillery firing tables. ARPANET provided nuclear-survivable communications. Neural network research was sustained through decades of commercial indifference by DARPA, NSF, and Office of Naval Research funding. The institutional genealogy matters because technologies carry the values of their originating institutions—and military values (efficiency, optimization, control, reliability, scalability) persist in civilian AI systems, shaping their characteristics in ways users experience without recognizing the institutional origins.
In The You On AI Field Guide
ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, was built at the University of Pennsylvania under U.S. Army contract to calculate ballistic firing tables. The institutional context was military, the funding governmental, the problem being solved the projection of lethal force