Science, innovation and civilization

Autonomous Agents, Technofeudal Power, and the Slow Liquidation of Human Rights.

"It is no longer okay to say you don't understand technology." — Brett Solomon, Access Now, Glion Human Rights Dialogue, December 2020

Prologue: The Sound of Gears Changing

There is a particular sound that precedes a shift in civilisational power. It is not the crash of artillery or the roar of a crowd. It is quieter than that — the low hum of servers in a cooled data centre in Virginia, the faint click of a decision being executed by a system that was not asked, that will not be thanked, and that cannot be held to account.

In December 2020, Brett Solomon, Executive Director of Access Now, stood before a virtual gathering of United Nations ambassadors and human rights officials and delivered what was, in retrospect, a warning dressed as a diagnosis. The international human rights framework, he said, was failing us in the digital age. Governments were abdicating responsibility. Technology companies were accumulating unchecked power. Rights were being eroded not by tyranny alone but by architecture — by the design of systems built to extract, manipulate, and surveil. The framework had resilience, he acknowledged, but resilience is not the same as efficacy. A building can survive a storm and still be condemned.

Solomon identified ten specific failure points: internet shutdowns, data exploitation, the weaponisation of counter-terrorism law, the digital divide, attacks on human rights defenders, the capture of humanitarian response by private surveillance firms. He named them carefully, like a doctor describing symptoms in a patient who has not yet been told the diagnosis.

Five years later, that patient has been given the diagnosis — and it is worse than the symptoms suggested.

"The map is not the territory." — Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933

Prologue: A Morning in Two Worlds

Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, a woman rises before dawn. She walks three kilometres to a well, balancing a clay vessel on her head with a precision that no algorithm taught her and no application will ever replicate. The path is familiar to her body before her mind is fully awake — the exact place where the soil turns to loose gravel, the low branch she ducks without thinking, the sound of other women's voices approaching in the dark. She greets them by name. She asks after someone's sick child. The well is cold and smells faintly of iron.

None of this is indexed. None of it appears in any dashboard. No platform captures the gesture of her hand on the rope, the specific weight of water against her spine on the return journey, or the quiet solidarity of those predawn conversations — a social contract renewed without paperwork or pixels.

Meanwhile, in a glass tower somewhere in San Francisco or Shenzhen or Stockholm, a conference room fills with people who speak with genuine conviction about the digital transformation of everything. They have charts. They have roadmaps. They are, in their fashion, sincere. They believe, because the evidence of their professional lives seems to confirm it, that the world is being fundamentally remade by the technologies they build.

They are right, and they are catastrophically wrong.

They are right that platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are reshaping commerce, communication, governance, and entertainment at a speed and scale that has few historical precedents. They are wrong to mistake the reshaped surface for the totality of human reality. Beneath the digital layer — and immeasurably larger than it — lies a world that existed before the first server was switched on and that will outlast the last one.

This essay is about that world. It is about the body that suffers and rejoices beyond the reach of code. It is about the two billion workers whose labour never passes through a platform. It is about the conversations that happen in kitchens and at bedsides and over graves that no algorithm will ever transcribe. It is about the practices — cooking, running, making music, holding the hand of the dying — that require full human presence and refuse all substitution.

It is, in the end, about what it means to be alive rather than merely connected.

My father repaired engines for most of his adult life. He never asked what an engine wanted, or what it was entitled to, or whether it would eventually surpass him. These questions would have struck him as faintly absurd — the sort of thing a man says when he has spent too long away from the workshop and not long enough under a chassis. What he understood, in the particular way that people understand things through their hands rather than their heads, was something rather more precise: that every tool has a threshold, and that the moment a tool crosses it — the moment it becomes capable of something its maker did not fully anticipate — the relationship between the person and the object is permanently altered.

I have been thinking about that threshold for weeks now. Not in relation to engines, but in relation to the systems we are building with such confidence and such urgency in the opening years of the twenty-first century. I have been reading the historical record — not searching for reassurance, which is what most people look for when they read history, but searching for the pattern. Because the pattern exists. It has always existed. And it does not especially care whether the people living through it have noticed it.

What follows is an attempt to trace that pattern from the Bronze Age to the present, and to say honestly what it suggests about where we are going.

In an AI-modified image, a 1983 Soviet stamp commemorating 1200 years since the birth of the Persian mathematician and astronomer Al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850 AD), from whom the term algorithm comes.

A Tool Is Never Just a Tool

Before the specifics, a point of principle. Every technology that has reshaped the global order has done so through the same mechanism: asymmetric advantage. The tool does not need to be universally available to be historically decisive. It needs only to be available to one actor — a state, an empire, a trading bloc — before its rivals. Even a brief monopoly, measured in years rather than decades, is sufficient to restructure the world.

The historian Peter Turchin, through his discipline of cliodynamics — the mathematical modelling of historical dynamics — has documented this with considerable rigour. Advances in military technology, he argues, exercise a transformative influence on civilisational structure that extends far beyond the battlefield. They reconfigure economies, accelerate ideological change, and redraw the maps through which power is distributed. The economist Michael Kremer adds a further dimension: larger populations produce proportionally more inventors, which accelerates the pace of innovation — a self-amplifying loop that, once initiated, is extraordinarily difficult to interrupt.

The pattern Turchin and others have documented runs as follows: invention at a single node; a period of strategic monopoly; gradual proliferation to rival actors; equilibration as all major players adopt the technology; and then permanent reconfiguration of the global order at a higher level of complexity. It has happened five times in recorded history in ways sufficiently decisive to be unmistakeable. It appears to be happening a sixth time now.

Rules written by people who are afraid of their own creation.

I sit in front of the screen and think about my father, who spent his days repairing engines and never once wondered whether an engine had rights. It was a question that simply did not exist. The engine either worked or it didn't. If it didn't, you took it apart, found the faulty component, and replaced it. There were no ethics committees for carburettors. No parliamentarians debating whether a connecting rod was permitted to move in this direction or that. And yet here we are, in 2025, with systems that write poetry, diagnose cancers, and draft legal contracts — and with legislators who still ask, with a gravity that ought to concern us, whether AI is closer to a hammer or to an employee. My father knew something he never put into words, but lived out in every working day of his life: that

…a tool that exceeds the understanding of the person wielding it is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a tool. It is a silent partner, with its own quirks and limits — and if you don't respect those limits, they cost you.

He spoke of this in terms of wear and mechanical tolerances. I am trying to speak of the same thing in terms of trained values and corporate constitutions. The language has changed. The underlying problem — the relationship between a person and the tool that outgrows them — has not.

The lag between AI's actual capabilities and our institutional capacity to govern it is not accidental. It is structural. And someone ought to say so plainly, without euphemism.