There’s something that’s not quite right with what’s going on in the world. Listen to me carefully today, if you care about the future of the world. I think we are misinterpreting what AI risk actually is. It’s not just about the broken culture in companies like OpenAI, but the incentives and cultures of the powers behind it and the Venture Capitalist interests and incentives who have, in part, taken over key areas of tech and AI policy in much of the direction of this U.S. Government, including at the Pentagon. Let me try and explain briefly. It’s a very serious situation.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia began in late February, 2022. That’s the same year that Generative AI took off four and a half years ago. I’m noticing worrying signs of escalation both in the Ukraine conflict but in how the U.S. is preparing to use AI to militarize (and weaponize) the technology in the future. The overlap of armed conflicts with the advent of drone swarms and more sophisticated military robotics means the U.S. is preparing for the real possibility of world war III.
The Ukraine conflict has become a mini-laboratory for the U.S. to study asymmetric warfare including the use of frontline robotics. So suddenly in 2026, there’s a huge spending spree by the U.S. and European VC community on robotics and Physical AI systems. Nowhere is this more apparent than the activities of people like Eric Schmidt while the Palantir related private company Anduril is ready to arm Taiwan. After years of setting the U.S. on a collision path with China, Schmidt runs Project Eagle (formerly called White Stork) this is basically a stealth initiative founded in late 2023 that focuses on building low-cost, AI-enabled kamikaze and interceptor drones.
Everything from Space to deep-sea mining and everything beneath the ocean will become contested zones between the West and the Eastern Block. In the next ten years, the U.S. will try to build an unimaginable weaponization of AI that will make the world a far more dangerous place, even as the Ukraine conflict appears to be escalating.
“We Must Win”
I try my best on this publication to cover AI news from many angles, from industry news to startups, to guides on how to use AI. But my biggest fear is that we’d reach this point where global conflict escalation and increasingly AI mediated technologies appears to be converging in an unregulated and accelerated way. There are signs we are near a tipping-point for Military AI in the United States of America.
I believe that between 2027 and 2037, in this immediate next decade we’ll be reaching the most dangerous period for military AI to cause massive harm to human civilization. I’m not a National Defense analyst but with Russia and the Ukraine targeting civilian infrastructure and fears that Russia will also begin offensives or escallate on the European (NATO) front are a cause for concern. That is, just when AI appears to becoming more powerful in things like cybersecurity (a military application), global conflict appears to risk serious escalation. I believe it will soon become impossible to maintain human-in-the-loop systems and safeguards in some, and a growing number of multiple and many new aspects of warfare.
