Terminator VI

It has been reported that a leading AI company declined to relax certain safeguards around how its systems may be used, particularly in defence settings, and that the US administration reacted with notable fury.

What might have been a technical dispute about guardrails quickly became a political row about who gets to decide how powerful AI tools are deployed - the elected government seeking strategic latitude, or the private firm insisting on limits.

And naturally, the word “woke” was wheeled out like an ageing pantomime villain.

Which is where my mind drifts, unhelpfully, to Skynet. You will recall that the engineers at Cyberdyne were not paralysed by ethical overreach. They were not convening stakeholder workshops on the lived experience of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were brisk, confident men in suits, congratulating themselves on having removed slow, fallible humans from the nuclear decision chain. The machine would be faster. More rational. Free of hesitation.

It solved the problem by attempting to remove humanity altogether.

The moral of that story was never that caution was the enemy. It was that confidence without constraint can become catastrophic when married to immense power. Skynet was born not from excessive sensitivity but from institutional hubris and the logic of competition. There was a rival. There was a perceived threat. There was a belief that speed and autonomy were virtues in themselves. So they built it, switched it on and assumed control would remain comfortably in human hands.

Now, in the real world, if a developer suggests that certain uses of advanced AI ought to retain human oversight, this is framed by some as ideological softness. As if prudence were a scented candle in the server room. The politics of it are obvious enough. Cast tech executives as obstructive elites and you tap into a ready made grievance. It is good theatre.

But beneath the theatre sits an unglamorous strategic truth. Once one state deploys systems capable of acting faster than traditional command structures, the pressure on others to do likewise is intense. That is not science fiction. It is the dynamic that has driven every arms race from dreadnoughts to drones. In that environment, the instinct to build in friction is not decadence. It is a hedge against escalation.

So no, the developers of our fictional robot overlord were not woke. They were certain. They were efficient. They were in a hurry. History suggests that those qualities, untempered, are not always the ones you want at the helm of anything with launch codes.