The Insanity of Humanity

This might be the most important article I have ever written.

A Russian drone has reportedly killed three civilians in Ukraine after using artificial intelligence to select its own target.

Read that sentence again.

The Terminator

A human being programmed and  launched the weapon and gave it a general mission. But according to investigators, the drone then navigated and selected the precise object it would attack without further human intervention. It appears to have targeted propane tanks at a petrol station in Zaporizhzhia. Instead, it struck beside an apartment building and exploded, killing three people, including a 19-year-old student.

This is not a scene from The Terminator. It is not a warning from a dystopian novel about something that might happen fifty years from now.

It has happened.

Drones For Death

We have entered an age in which machines are being given the authority to decide where lethal force will be applied. Software observes the world through cameras and sensors, compares what it sees with a programmed target profile, selects something to destroy and attacks.

There may still be human beings behind the mission. Humans manufacture the drone, define the target category and launch the weapon. But at the decisive moment—when one object is distinguished from everything surrounding it and marked for destruction—the machine may act alone.

This is a threshold humanity should never have crossed.

Yet, instead of stopping the insanity, every major military power will now feel compelled to move faster. If one country develops autonomous weapons, another will say it must do the same for its own protection. If one side deploys a hundred, the other will need a thousand. The drones will become smaller, cheaper, faster and more difficult to detect. They will learn to coordinate in swarms, recognize increasingly complex targets and continue operating when communication with a human controller has been lost or jammed.

The military justification will always be the same: if we do not build them, somebody else will.

That is how insanity becomes policy.

Where Does This End?

We Must Stop it

Where does an autonomous arms race ultimately lead?

Does the country possessing the largest number of killer drones eliminate everyone it considers a threat and then live happily ever after without all the bothersome others?

Of course not. After all, we are dependent on each other for survival on this planet. Even the most selfish and fearful leaders see that.

But autonomous weapons will not remain exclusively in the hands of a few powerful governments. The essential components already exist within the civilian economy: processors, cameras, navigation systems, motors, batteries and increasingly capable artificial intelligence. As the technology becomes cheaper, versions of these weapons will spread to smaller countries, militias, extremist organizations, criminal groups and individuals.

We must stop this before it is too late.

Nobody Will be Safe

Eventually, nobody will be safe.

Political leaders can be hunted. Dissidents can be hunted. Journalists, scientists, engineers and activists can be hunted. A person may be marked because of a uniform, a vehicle, a telephone signal, facial characteristics or simply because an algorithm incorrectly decides that the person matches a target profile.

Machines do not understand mercy. They do not recognize fear in another person’s eyes and lower their weapons. They do not see a wounded soldier and decide that enough people have died. They cannot refuse an immoral command because something inside them says it is wrong.

They process information and execute instructions.

A world saturated with autonomous weapons would not be a world controlled by one victorious superpower. It would be a world in which power itself had become uncontrollable. Nobody would necessarily know who launched a particular drone, who programmed it or whether its behavior had been altered. One automated attack could provoke another. Retaliation could begin before human beings even understood what had happened.

Wars could escalate at machine speed.

And these weapons would not necessarily remain on distant battlefields. The same systems could be used by governments against their own populations. A dictator would no longer need soldiers willing to fire upon their neighbors. Machines do not disobey, protest or experience remorse. A government controlling millions of autonomous weapons could make resistance almost impossible.

This is not security.

It is the automated imprisonment of humanity.

No One Wins

If these weapons ever become genuinely uncontrollable, they will continue killing until their targets disappear or the industrial systems supporting them collapse.

Power stations will fail. 

Transport will stop. 

Food distribution will break down. Hospitals will become inoperable. People will be unable to gather, travel or work safely. 

Eventually, most of the machines will also stop as batteries degrade, components break and replacement parts disappear.

Human civilization and its killer machines may collapse together.

That is the glorious destination of the arms race: humanity hiding underground while machines patrol the surface of the planet we ruined through our own fear.

Kill or Create

We have developed artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, global communications and extraordinary scientific knowledge. We possess technology that could help restore ecosystems, clean the oceans, cultivate food, construct homes and release humanity from dangerous and exhausting work.

And what do we do?

We teach machines to kill.

This is the insanity of humanity.

The Insanity of Separation

But beneath this insanity, humanity is not insane.

Beneath the fear, conditioning and the constant story of separation, there is an awareness within every one of us. In that awareness exists love, compassion, understanding and intelligence. It is the part of us that recognizes another human being not as an enemy, a competitor or an obstacle, but as another expression of the same life.

A Ukrainian child, a Russian mother, an American soldier, a Chinese engineer and an Iranian farmer are not separate forms of life with different fundamental values. They feel pain. They experience fear. They love their children. They want to live.

There are no Others

We have placed a frightened layer over this awareness. The ego divides the world into us and them. From it’s fear it constructs nations, armies, threats and enemies. It tells us that we can achieve safety only by possessing greater destructive power than everybody else.

Each side insists that it is merely defending itself. Each new weapon is justified as a response to the weapons of another. Everyone pursues security, yet everyone becomes progressively less secure.

Now we are taking this ancient insanity and embedding it in software.

We are giving fear cameras, wings and explosives. We are teaching artificial intelligence to recognize the enemies created by our own minds and destroy them with increasing efficiency.

The machine has not invented separation.

We have programmed it.

The Other Direction

The alternative is not to abolish technology. It is not to close every data center, abandon artificial intelligence or return to some imagined pre-industrial past.

The alternative is to give our technology another purpose.

The New Purpose

The same machine vision capable of recognizing a military target can recognize plastic in the ocean, an animal caught in an abandoned fishing net, the first signs of a forest fire or a person buried beneath earthquake rubble.

Autonomous machines can remove pollution, restore forests, repair infrastructure, cultivate food and monitor the health of ecosystems. Artificial intelligence can help humanity understand what resources exist, what people need and how production can be organized without destroying the living world..

The Choice is Ours

We can use artificial intelligence to compete more effectively against one another, or we can use it to build a civilization that works for everyone.

We can automate killing, or we can automate caring.

The technology is not making that choice.

We are.

A Message to World Leaders

To every head of state—and especially to the leaders of the world’s military powers:

Stop.

Refuse to authorize machines to select and attack human beings. Begin immediate negotiations for a binding global prohibition against autonomous weapons. Establish meaningful human control over every use of automated lethal force.

Do not wait for your rivals to move first, because they are waiting for you.

Somebody must interrupt the logic of fear. Somebody must possess the courage to say that humanity will not construct its future upon machines deciding who shall die.

True courage is not developing the most efficient killer drone. It is stepping out of an arms race when everyone around you insists that stopping is impossible.

You are not protecting your people by creating a technology that will inevitably spread and eventually be turned against them. You are not building peace by removing human conscience from the decision to kill. You are not demonstrating strength by surrendering life-and-death decisions to software.

This is one planet. 

We share one atmosphere, one biosphere and one future. No country can make itself permanently secure in a world where everyone else lives in fear.

The security of one nation cannot be built upon the insecurity of all others.

Share Another Future

I urgently beg you. 

I insist.

Please share this article.

Share it not for me, not for a political party or organization, and not because I want to sell books. Share it because humanity urgently needs to recognize the choice now before us.

Because the recent incident in Ukraine is not to be taken lightly. 

We are close to the ultimate choice.

The choice to perish as humanity or the choice to prosper together.

So please send it to friends. Send it to journalists, researchers, engineers, politicians, military commanders, technology executives and heads of state. Translate it. Republish it. Discuss it. Challenge it if you must—but do not ignore the direction in which we are moving.

Share not only the warning. 

Share the possibility of another future.

People cannot choose a possibility they have never been shown.

If the only futures presented to humanity are endless economic competition, military supremacy, automated warfare and survival against one another, we will continue constructing precisely that world.

We must make another civilization imaginable: a civilization based upon stewardship instead of ownership, cooperation instead of competition and intelligent access to abundance instead of an endless struggle for money and power. A world in which AI and robotics serve humanity and the whole living planet—not profit, domination, fear and war.

Somewhere within every government, military institution and technology company are human beings who still possess conscience and compassion. They must hear from us before fear makes the decision for them.

One article will not stop the machinery of war. But silence guarantees that the machinery will continue.

We do not need every human being to awaken at exactly the same moment. We need enough people to speak, share and demonstrate another direction. We need enough people to insist that the future does not belong to fear. We need enough people to remind those in power that there is still something within them deeper than the frightened voice demanding more weapons.

Humanity Stands at a Threshold

Down one road, nations surround themselves with increasingly autonomous instruments of death until every human being becomes a potential target and the entire planet becomes a battlefield controlled by machines.

Down the other road, we recognize that there are no others. 

We allow the intelligence, compassion and awareness within us to determine how our technology will be used. We stop preparing to destroy one another and begin building a world in which everyone can live.

This is not a distant philosophical choice.

It is happening now.

Please Share

Please carry this message as far as you can and as high as you can. Let it reach people with the power to change our direction. Let it remind them that another future remains possible.

We cannot base humanity’s future on killer drones.

Humanity thanks you.