New Term: Flash War

Here's a recent article over at NPR about autonomous weapons, in which we are introduced to the term "flash war."  It's a sort of mash-up of flash crash and (perhaps) blitzkrieg, the idea being that in a world filled with autonomous weapons, the decisions building into a major war could could happen faster than humans could react to shut it down, much in the same way as poorly designed high-frequency trading algorithms can drive a stock market crash through their inadvertent interactions.

In a very direct sense, the algorithms embodied in pre-WWI treaties had precisely this effect.  I suppose, from this point of view, a flash war has already happened, albeit at the speed of telegraph communications.

Anyway, it's something to watch out for, and an interesting article.