Lethal by Design
Military AI and the Crisis of Human Control
No parliament authorised it. No electorate voted on it. No court has held anyone accountable for a single autonomous strike decision.
How we got here
Since February 2022, Ukraine has become the first laboratory of mass autonomous warfare. Civilian engineers built first-person-view drones in garages and deployed them at scale before any procurement office had written a specification.
Lethal by Design documents the full arc of military AI: from the Cold War automation programmes that set the accountability templates still in use today, through the drone wars that normalised remote killing, to the corporate kill chain that turned a generation of technology companies into military infrastructure.
The question running through all twenty-seven chapters is the one that matters to anyone who governs technology: when a machine makes the decision, who answers for it?
Nine parts
- The Machine Before the Algorithm
- The Drone Wars
- The Corporate Kill Chain
- Ukraine
- Russia's Autonomous War
- Iran and the Proliferation of Autonomous Lethality
- China's Algorithmic Ambition
- The Proving Grounds
- The Ungoverned Battlefield
From the book
The Heaven VectorBut the Heaven Vector is available. It was available at every decision point documented in this book.
Closing
No researcher was required to consider the accountability implications of removing human control from lethal decisions.
Chapter 2 · DARPA and the Unmanned Horizon
Rogers had claimed responsibility, and nobody was held accountable.
Chapter 1 · Automation Before Intelligence
About the author
Andreas Hamberger is a New Zealand technology leader, enterprise architect and board director. His work spans enterprise architecture, AI governance and open source. He holds a Master of Arts in the Philosophy of Logic and founded Te Pono Limited.
Also by Andreas Hamberger: Enterprise Architecture in Practice, The Hallucination Economy, Space Mafia, Free as in Theft, The Manifesto of the Humanist Party.