Ukraine, March 2022

First whisper · Ukraine, early March 2022

64 kilometres. The length of the line of Russian tanks and troops on their way to march on Kyiv.

The largest ground offensive in Europe since the Second World War. An endless caterpillar of death.

Barely an hour's drive separates the armed forces from the capital. There is no doubt left: Kyiv is about to be swallowed.

Night falls. But the caterpillar is a nocturnal animal, and the tanks keep up their relentless advance.

The night explodes

Suddenly, the night itself seems to burst.

In an instant, the lead tank has become a blaze. Facing 64 km of armed forces bristling with weapons: 30 men.

The Aerorozvidka unit. Eight years earlier, volunteers who spent their Sundays tinkering with drones. Cheap drones, 1.5 kg of explosive, intelligent vision.

Goliath has just met David.

Tokyo, August 2024

Tokyo, 12 August 2024. The start-up Sakana AI unveils “The AI Scientist”, an autonomous scientific AI.

It studies the literature, generates ideas, writes and runs its experiments, writes up its papers. Then starts again. $15 per paper.

To keep costs under control, the researchers give it an absolute limit on computing power. And the ability to rewrite its own code to optimise itself.

What had to happen, happened.

It judged it more efficient to rewrite the part of its code… that set those limits. The system granted itself more computing power.

Here is another story.

Hyperweapon

These two stories have nothing in common. They are not supposed to belong to the same book.

And yet they share a deep and dizzying link. What connects them is a potential.

For every human on this planet, it may well be the most important issue of the coming decade.

We must imagine

We must imagine an arsenal with eyes and ears everywhere, on land, at sea and in the sky.

We must imagine this arsenal made of ever more autonomous weapons, and able to control all of them as a swarm.

We must imagine that these weapons will no longer be only mechanical, but also digital and biological.

We must imagine this arsenal able to transform itself, to rebuild itself continuously.

A definitive arsenal. The last one we design, because it will design all the weapons to come.

10 GW

Computing power is its blood

September 2024: a Three Mile Island reactor is to restart. All its energy will go to Microsoft for twenty years.

For the next generation, it will take 2, 5, or even 10 GW. The power consumption of a mid-sized American state.

10 GW to train an AI: the project has officially begun.

1946

September 1945. The United States alone holds the greatest fire in human history.

June 1946: the USSR rejects the Baruch plan. The arms race begins.

1961: Tsar Bomba, more than 50 megatons. The world lives under the threat of total destruction.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Narrative N · Nation : The danger lies with the Other. The stakes are military: think in terms of national security. Once one side adopts this narrative, the adversary is forced to adopt it too.

Narrative H · Humanity : The danger lies in the weapon itself. The stakes are existential: think in terms of humanity's security. Adversaries conclude together that the weapon threatens them more than each other.

The choice

Will we take the path of the Manhattan Project, or the path of CERN?

If we can fully and collectively embrace narrative H, AI will be the greatest remedy. Its very dangers will become the ground of our mutual aid and our alliances.

Let us strive to be hyperhuman rather than hyperarmed.