Artificial intelligence, robotics and societal change: The last revolution in the history of humanity?
SpaceX has just provided a rather useful illustration of a problem that has been worrying me about artificial intelligence.
According to Reuters, SpaceX has introduced a restriction on the use of its Starlink service in Ukraine which means that the military-grade version stops working above 160 km/h. Ukrainian officials say they weren’t warned in advance, and that the change disrupted some drone missions.
In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Hari Seldon develops a science capable of predicting the broad course of history. Individual people remain unpredictable, but the behaviour of vast populations can be described mathematically. Empires fall, institutions change and crises arrive, all within a future that Seldon has calculated. Then the Mule turns up. He possesses an extraordinary ability to manipulate human emotions, giving one individual a power that Seldon’s calculations did not accommodate. The predictions cease to be dependable because the world now contains something outside the assumptions on which they were built.
I increasingly think this is a useful way to understand superhuman AI. We keep trying to estimate its consequences by consulting the history of a world in which it did not exist.
Anthropic researchers have been warning that AI could cause human extinction. More colleagues have publicly backed those concerns. It is a frightening possibility. But there is another thought experiment worth considering: what happens if we build something vastly more intelligent than ourselves that genuinely wants to keep us safe?
Per aspera ad astra: through hardship to the stars. For generations, it has also been a fairly good description of professional life. You spend years learning something difficult, acquire experience, become good at it and eventually society rewards you for possessing skills that other people do not.
Continue reading “Per Astra ad aspera”
On 12 June 2026, Anthropic announced that the US government had ordered it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, “whether inside or outside the United States”, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. The company said it had therefore disabled both models for all customers while it worked out how to comply. This was not an ordinary country-based export restriction. It was a citizenship-based restriction on access to some of the most capable AI systems yet released by an American company.
That decision looks crude, and it is. But it becomes less mysterious when read alongside Anthropic’s own numbers. In its Institute essay on recursive self-improvement, Anthropic says that by the second quarter of 2026 its typical engineer was merging eight times as much code per day as in 2024. The broad point is obvious: this is no longer merely a better autocomplete. It is the beginning of a multiplier.
On 12 June 2026, Anthropic announced that the US government had ordered it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, “whether inside or outside the United States”, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. The company said the practical effect was that it had to disable both models for all customers while it worked out compliance. Access to other Anthropic models was not affected, but the principle had been established: the most advanced AI systems could be treated not as ordinary commercial software, but as strategic assets controlled by citizenship.
Continue reading “On AI, Citizenship and the Multiplier”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers?
Juvenal was not thinking about datacentres, model weights, recursive self-improvement or the possibility that the most powerful minds on Earth might one day be housed in racks of humming machines, but good questions have a way of returning in new clothes. For most of history, “who watches the watchers?” has been a political question. Who watches the king, the priest, the judge, the soldier, the civil servant, the expert? Liberal democracy is largely an answer to that question: divide power, create institutions, make authority answerable, never trust any single guardian too much.
Continue reading “Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?”