In November 2017, a short, eight-minute horror film went viral on the internet. The dystopic "Slaughterbots” depicts attack drones equipped with facial recognition software infiltrating the U.S. Congress and universities and selectively killing senators and students who have spoken out against corruption. The film never makes clear who is behind the attacks. A government? A terrorist group? Or perhaps a cutting-edge arms manufacturer producing new AI-powered weapons, led by a young, charismatic CEO who markets autonomous killer drones as the future of warfare.

"Slaughterbots” was made as a warning. At the end of the film, one of its creators appears on camera: the British computer scientist Stuart Russell. The clip, says Russell, one of the world’s leading AI researchers, shows the danger of merging AI with novel weapons systems, and of machines taking over life-and-death decisions. "We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw," Russell says. "But the window to act is closing fast."

When "Slaughterbots” came out, it was dismissed as overwrought science fiction from notorious tech pessimists. Paul Scharre, a former Pentagon analyst, said it was nonsense. "It is sensationalist fear-mongering,” he wrote in December 2017.

Today, drones have completely transformed the way wars are fought. In Ukraine, drones now dominate the battlefield, tracking troop movements and swooping down on anything that moves: soldiers, tanks, transport vehicles. Some estimates suggest that more than 90 percent of Russian soldiers killed on the battlefield are now dying at the hands of Ukrainian drones.

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Few sectors of the defense industry are growing as rapidly as the market for unmanned systems such as drones, which combine modern weapons technology with artificial intelligence. The German company Helsing, founded only in 2021, is now valued at 12 billion euros. Shield AI, based in San Diego, is in the process of raising more than a billion dollars in investor funding. Palantir has risen to become an Orwellian software giant whose products are said to use AI to distinguish friend from foe – and whose CEO, Alexander Karp, speaks with the same blend of messianic brutality used by the fictional drone company's boss in "Slaughterbots.” Our adversaries, Karp has said, need to "wake up scared” and "go to bed scared.”