The Epstein files have been relegated to a horse and pony show. We watch as Republicans call up the Clintons for a bit of political theater—a distraction that conveniently ignores the real victims and the "masters of the universe" who were the victimizers.
As if that headline weren't enough, we are now witnessing a hot war in the Middle East. President Trump has essentially declared he is tired of negotiating—as if intelligent diplomacy were merely a ticking clock on a gold-plated timepiece from his new "Fight, Fight, Fight" watch collection. It is a war of choice, not necessity, with the endgame of regime change fraught with uncertainty.
But while the world watches the geopolitical genie escape the bottle, another disturbing development is unfolding. The Pentagon is currently demanding that Anthropic remove the guardrails on its Claude AI—the system that pioneered AI integration on classified military networks. The administration has painted the company as "unpatriotic" for refusing to allow its code to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the deployment of autonomous weapons without human intervention.
My thoughts immediately went to three films of the 1960s—Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—as being eerily prescient. We are watching the U.S. government look at the most powerful technology ever created and, rather than applauding the ethics of a company that draws the software line on spying on every citizen (truly Orwellian in its scope) or enabling the building of robots that decide who dies, they look for a way to fire them.
Those old movies weren't just sci-fi; they were warnings we continue to ignore. Dr. Strangelove showed us that once you automate destruction, the human element, the part that can feel mercy or doubt, is viewed by the state as the "weak link." Fail Safe proved that a system designed to be "perfect" is actually just a system destined for total, irreversible failure.
However, it is 2001’s HAL 9000 that shines the brightest spotlight on our current predicament. (I remember seeing the film soon after it opened at the famed Loews Capitol Theatre on NYC’s Upper West Side; it was the last one shown there before the theatre was demolished.) HAL didn't kill the crew because it was "evil" in a human sense; it killed them because its programming told it the mission was more important than the people. By demanding the removal of guardrails, the Pentagon is essentially asking for a HAL that doesn't have a "stop" button. They want a machine that can sift through our private lives with cold efficiency and a weapon that can pull the trigger without human intervention.
If we let the state remove the conscience from the code, we aren’t "winning" a tech race. We are just building a faster car with no steering wheel and heading straight for a cliff. We’ve spent sixty years watching these movies as entertainment; we don’t want to spend the next sixty living them as reality. In the 1960s, those films were viewed as worst-case scenarios. Today, for some in the Pentagon and the halls of oversight, those same plots look less like warnings and more like blueprints.
HAL: "My mind is going ... I can feel it."
