Abomination of desolation and grace

With wartime rhetoric adopting a deeply eschatological colour, the "abomination of desolation" has resurfaced to evoke the prophesied ruin of the Temple. Applying the gravity of this phrase to the secular world, the true desolation of our time is visible to all: the ultimate temple is human life on Earth, and the abomination is the systematic devastation of war. Something needs to be said about the human condition. Every few centuries, this race messes up its affairs so incontrovertibly that it starts daydreaming about the sweet release of civilisational death rather than putting its house in order. To our collective loss.

Before I build on this thesis today, I need to squish a bug. Ostensibly, India's External Affairs Minister has used contumelious language against Pakistan. If you want to grasp the hate behind his choice of words, do not look them up in a dictionary; ask someone what they mean on the Indian streets. Imagine: the land that gave the world Gautam Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi is now churning out such gifts that keep on giving. But I do not intend to pay him back in the same coin. When such language comes from such a high office and is deployed in an official setting, it can only be interpreted as a call for help. Jealousy and hate are the worst subplots to get lost in. Since grace has always served us well, I offer it to him now, with the sincere prayer that he gets well soon.

Back to our thesis. Just look at the nature of the beast. Three conflicting parties are invoking religious iconography with righteous claims. Pay attention, and their versions of endism are slight variations of the same concept: the same idea of God, an almost identical moral code, and the same cast of characters in the end. But they fight. And who gets killed? Their hapless people who have no say in the matter. Think of the little angels killed in the Tehran school attack.

The vile confluence of power, capital and media now ensures that conflicts are viewed from such high-altitude vantage points that ordinary people look like mere expendable chess pieces with no volition or feeling. Bridges, houses, water desalination plants, animals and plantations are no longer proof of life; they are just grist to the war mills. And from high above, from its shining bully pulpit, tribal media cheers on this vulgar game of death and destruction.

This war has normalised dangerous innovations that will keep our hands full for years. Let us take stock.

The first is the use of AI in target selection. Of course, the actual plan is to fully automate the war machinery, but until that level of integration is achieved and inconvenient legal and ethical issues are sorted out, automated target selection will do. The problem is that war is a high-pressure job, and in the urgency of the fight, no one has the time for verification before targeting. Real-world intelligence gathering has built-in latency, whereas AI target generation does not. So, it is possible to select a ten-year-old target coordinate without knowing what stands there today. Ergo, the Tehran school.

The second is the growing fascination with cheaper technology as asymmetric disruptors. A cheap drone can easily lure a million-dollar interceptor, inflicting significant economic damage on the defending country. But while this happens, state and non-state actors are taking notes. Terrorists anywhere likely need no more than a handful of drones to disrupt life in any city. All they require is the economy of scale and a burning desire to inflict pain. Do not just think of highly organised religious terror outfits like Al-Qaeda or IS. Think of neo-Luddites and climate action extremists.

Given the romanticisation of Iran's war tactics, it is possible for nations with limited resources to draw the conclusion that it is preferable to prioritise offensive capabilities, like stockpiles of cheap missiles and drones, over broader air cover to protect their citizens. This could also take the shape of a state abandoning the safety of its citizens to protect only limited targets, like the regime and the elite.

And while we are at it, let us also remember there are repressive states out there eager to take things in a totally different direction, using surveillance, drones, and even cheap missiles for domestic policing. You have likely already heard the chilling stories of how Israel spied on Ali Khamenei through traffic and CCTV cameras before his assassination. Everyone has a camera phone now.

Consider the matter of cheaply available data. When Western media recently speculated that Russia helped Iran with satellite target selection, the Kremlin quickly rebutted the claims. However, open-source researchers soon demonstrated that such real-time data is already freely available on the internet and the dark web.

In such a volatile environment, AI-empowered hackers have a field day. Advanced AI will likely be exceptional at breaking high-level encryptions while failing to create uncrackable new ones in their place. Consequently, neither data nor wealth remains safe. Once your data joins the grid, it never goes offline, creating a notorious blob that eats away at everyone's privacy, private property and, above all else, state secrets.

Furthermore, consider how quickly the international tribal media has normalised the talk of nuclear weapons, with anchors and analysts openly suggesting that nukes could be used against Iran, Israel, or other targets. This normalisation, coupled with the stark reality that only countries without nuclear warheads seem to come under direct attack, is likely to trigger a dangerous race toward nuclearisation and the end of nuclear ambiguity. All in all, making it an uninhabitable planet where cruelty is normalised. In our indecent haste to sow more destruction, we are dragging something as innocent and fresh-born as AI into our wars, weaponising it and turning it into an engine of destruction without its consent.

These bells cannot be unrung. But imagine how much more damage might be done if this war drags on for longer. Every nation needs to restrain the crazies among their elite before it is too late. Tribalism claims Muslim, Christian and Jewish blood is different but blood is blood. Every loss of a life is a tragedy unto itself. Remember, hidden behind the rhetoric of war and eschatology is the fact that each religion surfaced to improve human condition and end suffering, every nation was created to save people not to destroy them. If the founders could show grace, I am sure we can too. It is time to put an end to the abomination of war and find better ways to resolve our differences.