Autonomous weapons, algorithmic governance, and concentrated technological power are not separate crises but a single, accelerating pattern.
The people of the planet may or may not be able to reverse these trends. What we definitely can do is work where we are to keep power local and out of the hands of people in positions where power corrupts. We can create local processes that support and defend local interests. We can do our best to network to other locally-based nodes of human support across our countries and the world. We can resist concentrations of power and support and help one another. While we may not always be able to control outcomes, we can do the right thing wherever we are. The site was launched in February 2026. Content is still being added. Share. Offer to help if you wish.
Another Race No Nation Can Win
Operation Epic Fury — the February 2026 US-Israeli campaign against Iran — demonstrated at nation-state scale what AI-assisted warfare actually looks like: machines assigning probabilities to human lives, humans approving recommendations they had seconds to evaluate. This essay examines the military logic that follows, the energy geography that drives it, and the asymmetry that no superpower can escape — because the cost of autonomous weapons is falling exponentially, and every nation will eventually be able to enter the race. The question is not who wins. No one wins. The question is what we can do for one another in the meantime.
The Machine We Are Building Into the Machine
When the Pentagon gave Anthropic an ultimatum in February 2026 — surrender your safety guardrails or be designated a national security threat — it forced into public view a question that has been assembling for decades: Who controls the machines we are building to make decisions about life and death? This essay is a firsthand account from the center of autonomous weapons policy in Washington, the drafting of the Human Control of Weapons Act in 2014, and why the language the Pentagon and AI companies use to claim human oversight is a permission structure, not a constraint. The moral requirement is not a reliability standard. It does not move when the technology improves.
The Human Control of Weapons Act
Drafted in 2014 and presented to Congress, this proposed legislation draws a clear line: Every weapons system must require the positive action of a human being to initiate engagement of each specific individual target. Rather than attempting to define what an autonomous weapon is — a definitional fight the Pentagon would always win — the Act specifies what any weapons system must have: direct, accountable human control. It closes the “autonomous” and “semi-autonomous” escape hatches, requires encrypted data recording for accountability, and includes a carefully bounded exception for purely defensive systems. It also directs the President to pursue an international treaty using its terms as a model. Congress did not act. The language it was written to replace is still operational.
Epstein: A Wound You Recognized
Jeffrey Epstein’s network disturbs us because it rhymes with something most of us already know — the authority whose power felt wrong, the moment we understood our performance was the price of our security. This essay connects the architecture of elite coordination and abuse to the same logic embedded in the automated systems this project concerns: coordination above, competition below, extraction hidden in the machinery. What the Epstein files revealed is not an aberration. It is the operating system, applied at industrial scale to people who already understood, in their bones, how it works.
Into the Lockdowns: 47 US States
During the COVID lockdowns, while journalists reported from home and political elites debated policy from the safety of their offices, this project took to the road across 47 states — no GPS, local radio only, never deciding the next destination until leaving the last one. The goal was not to build a case but to gather primary evidence about what was actually happening to people, and to become someone whose understanding of this country came from direct encounter rather than from what others had already decided to remotely see. What was found was a society in the process of choosing who gets protected and who bears the weight — a triage logic now being encoded into automated systems at scale. There is more: about children’s faces, about social displacement, about the intimate architecture of what we owe one another. It is still being written.
The Fiction of Human Control
The language circulating in Washington and Geneva in 2026 — human control, meaningful human control, human authorization — shares a common structural feature: None of it requires a human being to decide to kill a specific person. Parameters are not decisions. Accountability for a system is not accountability for what the system does. Accountability is only upon the future persons the machine’s parameters eventually find. There is an informing gap between the language being written and a standard that could actually close it.
Facing the Current
Agreement on everything is not possible, and it is not what we need. What humanity requires is the capacity to work together across disagreement — because we are vitally interdependent, and because the alternative is factions, isolation, and the drain of conflict on every resource we need to build something decent together. This short essay is the Human Peace Project’s statement of operating philosophy: How to stay in relationship with people whose paths diverged from yours, why difference is information rather than threat, and what it means to hold your angle against the current rather than fight it directly.