The winners of wars are the quickest to innovate, the fastest to reach technological milestones. Progress depends on speed. And now this dynamic is driving the race in AI. Here, former British Intelligence officer Andy Owen argues that we must slow down technological progress. Every new technology brings its own dangers, and currently we do not have the ability to account for or predict the risks. Furthermore, Owen argues, technology will never replace human thought, or a million and one of the other things we value; treating it as though it can will only lead to ruin. The race is not worth the risk.  

 Writing almost 50 years ago, in Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio argued that the strategy and technology of war are the primary accelerators of human progress through the pursuit of velocity. Virilio’s dromology (science of speed) presciently described the impact of new technologies on war and an accelerating society. Virilio’s work also provides insight into the reaction to rapidity: the warfare of deceleration.

Virilio asserted that history is driven not by economics or class struggle. Power belongs to whoever controls velocity and the capacity to move fastest from identifying a target to having a destructive effect on it. Military logistics designs and produces the speed systems that can achieve this. They then orient society towards the production of systems that come to dictate civilian life.

In Crepuscular Dawn, Virilio sketches out three revolutions of speed. Firstly, the transport revolution, focusing on physical movement across terrestrial space and geopolitical boundaries from “metabolic bodies” of soldiers to the development of engines, trains, and automobiles, to ballistics capable of delivering nuclear warheads across continents, thus rendering the whole globe the battlefield. Secondly, the transmission revolution of telecommunications and computers, which collapses physical distance, replacing localized space with simultaneous electronic cyberspace. Lastly, he foresaw a transplantation revolution, characterized by the miniaturization of technology, increasing the speed of informational ingestion by feeding it directly into humans by “micromachines.”

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These revolutions lead to a “Dromocratic” State, where political control shifts from managing people in a fixed space to controlling the speed of movement and communication. The nation-state decays as technological speed renders borders obsolete. Acceleration replaces territorial sovereignty and democratic governance with global surveillance technology, the tyranny of automated systems, and logistics-based power.

The multi-matrixed world we are now in, as the post-1945 order fragments and barriers are going up, sees Virilo’s decaying but not yet obsolete nation-states forming complex, often contradictory, matrices of alliances across trade, security, energy, and cultural communality. Rather than rigid alliance blocs, states are situated in complex, web-like matrices of overlapping agreements, while attempting to resist the gravitational pull of regional powers engaged in global competition. States attempt to hedge rather than choose sides, motivated by survival and mutual benefit rather than ideology. These matrices are actively reordering security alliances, trade flows, and financial architectures. Struggling to maintain sovereignty, countries routinely develop partnerships with actors who do not share their values. Partners in one arena are direct adversaries in another. Alliances are transactional, overlapping, subject to rapid realignment, and reaching complexities that the diplomats and politicians charged with managing them are unable to comprehend. Woven into these alliances are powerful multinational companies, for years seen as rootless concentrations of stateless capital, but now increasingly being pulled back into geopolitics—not the old geopolitics of sovereign states asserting dominion—rather a relationship of mutual possession.

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