The transformation of the conditions of human action puts at stake our freedom to determine its ends. As communications, artificial intelligence, and robotics converge, this question has become one of the major challenges of the civilizational transformation now under way.
Civilizations Facing a New World
As early as 1869, Nikolai Danilevsky challenged the notion of a universal civilization modeled on Europe’s development in Russia and Europe. He identified several historical and cultural types, each following its own path. Later, Pyotr Savitsky developed the concept of “mestorazvitie”, or “place-development,” linking territory, human communities, and historical development.
The Chinese tradition offers other conceptual resources. Tianxia, “all under Heaven,” historically situates political organization within an encompassing conception of world order. The concept is being reinterpreted today, notably by Zhao Tingyang.
These approaches remind us that powers are more than territorial entities pursuing material interests. They also carry historical memories, visions of political order, and distinctive understandings of their place in the world.
Contemporary China cannot be understood solely through its rivalry with the United States. Russia, Iran, and India likewise approach contemporary change through their own civilizational legacies.
Yet, these historically differentiated societies now operate within an increasingly integrated technological environment.
The unification of the material conditions of human action does not entail the uniformity of the ends that guide it.
Yet, a deeper contradiction emerges.
Technology vastly expands the range of possible actions. But as societies become dependent on increasingly complex systems, they may find their freedom to choose the ends of those actions constrained.
Humanity has ever more powerful means at its disposal. Does that mean it has greater control over its own future?
The Metamorphosis of Time
1.1 Communication Networks
From the telegraph to satellites and the internet, successive innovations have transformed the relationship between distance, information, and decision-making. Activities that once took weeks to coordinate can now be synchronized almost instantly.
This compression of time changes the very way power is organized.
A company spreads its production across several continents. A financial institution operates in multiple markets at once. A military force draws on information gathered thousands of kilometers from its theater of operations. Territory still matters, but a new space of relationships now overlays it.
This environment rests on material infrastructure: undersea cables, satellites, power grids, data centers, and computer systems. It has its concentrations, chokepoints, and vulnerabilities. The more readily actors can operate at a distance, the more they rely on networks whose workings they may not fully control. A communications outage, an energy disruption, or the disabling of infrastructure can now generate consequences far removed from their point of origin. Territorial sovereignty no longer guarantees control over the means indispensable to its exercise.
A geography of connections now complements the geography of territories. An actor’s power has become inseparable from the dependencies linking it to others.
1.2 Artificial Intelligence: A New Pace for the World
Networks carry information. Artificial intelligence helps interpret that information and turn it into a capacity to act.
It can analyze vast quantities of data, detect patterns, build predictive models, and support decision-making.
Yet, its significance lies in more than increased computing power.
In certain applications, the speed of its operations vastly exceeds the pace of human deliberation.
This mismatch transforms the relationship between information and decision.
When technological systems generate, rank, and use information faster than people can scrutinize its underlying assumptions, operational efficiency may rise even as human control diminishes.
Speed thus becomes both a source of power and a potential source of dependency.
Yet, this development depends on extensive physical infrastructure: semiconductors, data centers, communications networks, and energy supplies.
Under the International Energy Agency’s central scenario, worldwide electricity consumption by data centers would rise from approximately 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours in 2030.
Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as immaterial. Yet, it is directly reshaping energy demand and industrial structures.
Control over digital capabilities depends on physical resources, supply chains, and infrastructure distributed across the world.
Technological, economic, energy, and strategic domains are becoming ever more interdependent.
A new stage is now unfolding: artificial intelligence is beginning to converge with machines capable of acting in the physical world.
2. When Artificial Intelligence Takes Physical Form
Until now, contemporary artificial intelligence has developed primarily around information processing. Robotics, meanwhile, has extended machines’ ability to act in the physical world.
These two paths are converging in what may be called the “embodiment” of AI.
Working with sensors, memory, communications, and motor systems, artificial intelligence can be built into systems capable of perceiving their surroundings, adapting their behavior, and acting in the physical world.
A feedback loop links perception, interpretation, decision, and action. The consequences of an action become new information, allowing the system to adjust its behavior.
The difference is fundamental.
Mechanization multiplied human physical strength. Computing automated some forms of calculation and information processing.
The integration of AI and robotics now extends automation to functions directly involved in organizing action.
Machines no longer merely carry out preset instructions. Some can adapt what they do to changing circumstances, within the goals, capabilities, and constraints assigned to them.
This functional autonomy requires neither consciousness nor human intentionality.
Yet it marks a historically distinctive development: artificial systems are performing tasks that once required direct human intervention.
Civilization, by contrast, has developed through the actions of people capable of forming intentions, pursuing ends, and organizing their activities collectively.
What is changing is not simply the power of machines, but the place of human beings in the organization of action.
We are still only at the beginning of this transformation.
3. War as a Laboratory for a Broader Transformation
War reveals the convergence of these transformations with particular intensity.
In Ukraine, drones have profoundly altered reconnaissance, engagement, and the protection of forces.
But the most significant development is not any single piece of equipment. It is the succession of innovations and countermeasures.
The spread of radio-controlled drones prompted advances in electronic jamming. Fiber-optic-controlled drones then emerged as a way around certain forms of interference, forcing defenders to develop new countermeasures.
This sequence reveals a fundamental shift: military effectiveness now depends on cycles of adaptation in which communications, electronics, software, industry, and weapons change together.
An innovation does more than change one actor’s capabilities. It immediately changes the constraints to which its adversaries must respond.
The speed of adaptation has become a strategic factor in its own right.
This transformation reaches beyond Ukraine. In both the United States and China, military researchers are exploring new uses for robotic systems, including humanoid robots.
The widespread replacement of infantry soldiers is not an operational reality. But machines can already perform some tasks previously reserved for combatants.
As early as 1953, Philip K. Dick imagined, in Second Variety, humanoid war machines whose evolution exceeded the intentions of their creators.
That fictional vision anticipated a question that has now become concrete.
What happens to the exercise of power when machines acquire a growing ability to perceive, select, and act autonomously?
4. Controllability: The Paradox of Power
This brings us to the heart of the problem.
Technology increases what armed forces can do. Yet its complexity and speed can also diminish the human capacity to understand and control the processes on which those actions depend.
A decision may remain formally in human hands while relying on algorithmic recommendations that the operator lacks the time or means to scrutinize adequately.
The International Committee of the Red Cross specifically highlights the risks posed by autonomous weapon systems capable, once activated, of selecting and engaging targets without further human intervention.
Automation, then, is not the same as mastery.
A machine can identify characteristics, calculate, recommend, or carry out certain operations. Unlike a human person, it does not bear the political, legal, and moral responsibility for the decision to use force.
The danger is not limited to the prospect of a machine escaping its designers’ control altogether.
It also arises when an organization gradually delegates its judgment to systems whose operations it can no longer fully oversee.
Human approval may remain part of the procedure without amounting to meaningful control over the decision.
Speed is decisive here. The formal ability to intervene means little if there is no longer enough time to understand the situation and exercise judgment.
This contradiction extends far beyond the military sphere.
It concerns societies whose infrastructure, institutions, and activities depend on automated systems that no single actor can grasp in their entirety.
Controllability is no longer merely a technical problem. It becomes a question of governance and, ultimately, of human freedom.
5. Humanity in Search of Equilibrium
Globalization has drawn humanity into an increasingly interdependent whole. Like a living organism, this planetary system undergoes crises, makes adjustments, and seeks equilibrium through feedback mechanisms.
Yet, its actors still largely operate according to ideas inherited from a world of separate powers, competing sovereignties, and relations of domination.
Historical and civilizational traditions remain distinct, and the ends pursued by different societies do not necessarily coincide. Yet, the technological conditions under which they act are becoming ever more interconnected.
The world is integrating faster than the ideas and institutions meant to organize it can adapt.
This mismatch in pace helps explain the depth of contemporary crises.
We are not simply witnessing a redistribution of power. We are entering a transformation of the very conditions of human action.
On the scale of history, this transformation belongs alongside the great ruptures that reshaped the conditions of life: agriculture, writing, mechanization, and computing.
Yet the integration of artificial intelligence and robotics is distinctive: it reaches directly into the relationship between knowledge, decision, and action, long central to the organization of human societies.
War makes the dangers immediately visible. But the consequences extend far beyond conflict.
We judge events through the lens of our immediate concerns, although their significance belongs to a far longer historical timescale. Historians from the centuries ahead will see our era as one of the great turning points in human history.
A fundamental question follows. Societies seek stability and peace. But stability does not necessarily mean that human beings remain free to determine their own ends. Civilizational diversity is more than a variety of traditions and institutions. It also embodies different understandings of existence, the world, and humanity’s purpose. This diversity is an essential source of human richness: it preserves different ways of understanding, organizing, and directing human development.
Yet technological integration is changing the very conditions under which those differences can find expression. By imposing growing demands for speed, compatibility, and efficiency, technological systems may gradually narrow the range of possibilities that remain genuinely open. A common set of means may therefore, without anyone explicitly intending it, reduce the diversity of ends.
Here the question of controllability reaches its deepest level. It is no longer simply a matter of retaining the ability to decide how to act, but of preserving the freedom to determine why we act and to what ends.
Will humanity retain the freedom to choose its own direction? Or will the collective organization of the world come to determine even the purpose of individual lives, like a vast termite colony?
From a spiritual perspective, the stakes are immense.
Beyond the pursuit of peace, what is now at stake is humanity’s freedom to choose its own destiny.
Olivier Roynard, French essayist and independent researcher on the relationship between geopolitics and the transformation of political and intellectual forms in the modern world
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