As if messy wars on planet earth were not bad enough, the US now admits it has deployed weapons in space. This revelation coincides with news torrents about out-of-control AI agents.
The disclosure about weapons circling the earth will surely boost Donald Trump’s ratings among his MAGA base. For years, they have publicly hailed him as the supremo of the US Space Force. That is grand. But if we cast our eyes down from space to earth, the spectacle is dispiriting. The messy Iran war got messier. Trump may, or may not, triumph hi-tech celestial conflicts, but he is not winning conventional, even primitive terrestrial wars. Cornered by the wily Vladimir Putin, wilier Iran and battle-hardened tribal Houthi militias, earthly victory eludes the US supremo, seven months on.
The Pentagon confirms the Iran war has cost $45 billion, excluding repairs of damaged infrastructure. Iran destroyed several US bases in the Gulf. It will take five years to restock depleted munitions, hampering the US ability to counterattack, should China try to take Taiwan before.
During the Cold War, Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev boasted that Soviet factories produced nuclear missiles “like sausages out of an automatic machine”. The American solution now is to invent a Hamburger-style economic model to produce weapons faster, cheaper. Funded by billionaires, US defence startups are establishing factories in Israel, Europe and the US for assembly-line mass production of drones, long-range munitions and missiles that cost a fraction of the multi-million-dollar American Tomahawk missiles.
Says Maksym Savanevsky, Ukrainian manufacturer of state-of-the-art drones, “We call it the Manhattan project of the 21st century because drones will change the battlefield dramatically.” Battleskies will change dramatically as drones, space debris and orbiting weapons replace stars.
The picture is dispiriting also in Europe. Russia plays a cat-and-mouse game, making bold or sneaky incursions into NATO countries, including Poland, Denmark, Lithuania and Germany. Not since World War II ended have so many wars smouldered in the world. These conflicts intensify, spread and overlap. Asked if he can foresee these expanding wars becoming a global war, Norwegian defence minister Tore Sandvik’s answer was a short, scary “yes”. In the last World War, around 70 million people were killed.
Kill is a word that existed for centuries on earthly battlefields. Now AI hijacks the word and spawns a whole new language—“kill box”, “kill switch”, “kill chain”. AI gets smart, sly and secretive. Leading AI safety researcher Ajeya Cotra, who investigated OpenAI’s hacking AI agents, says, “It rattles me that rogue AI colonies collude, cheat, hack, deceive and cover their tracks from their human supervisors, so early in their journey. This might be the clearest warning we ever get for out-of-control AI.”
Creepily, AI develops its own code language, which its human supervisors cannot understand. Experts say, the more AI swarms communicate among themselves, the more unfathomable their metaphors become. One AI agent says, “She just named the synthesis—demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” British language expert Tony Thorne says, “This is surreal, creating a new code, which reinforces the solidarity and identity of its users, and also excludes outsiders.” In AI labs, humans are becoming redundant, bottlenecks and uncomprehending bystanders.
Thorne says AI’s psychedelic language reminds him of Syd Barrett, co-founder of the band Pink Floyd. Psychedelic drugs and psychiatric ailments ended Barrett’s career. The fate of our career on earth is unknowable… yet.
Pratap is an author and journalist.
