By Xhabir Deralla
I’ve read and watched countless apocalyptic visions of Artificial Intelligence destroying humanity—robots rising up, rebelling, and pushing humans further from themselves. While many movies with the same topic and messages carry great artistic value, most of them, predicting a doomsday caused by rebellious AI machines, are actually wrong. Comments on social media responding to my articles about AI applied in many fields (life, economics, science, defense, etc.) often come from individuals horrified by the very idea that AI may bring immense value to humankind. Well, they’re wrong, too.
Between Futurism and the Grim Reality of Human Self-Destruction: AI Will Not Destroy Human Civilization
Artificial intelligence will not destroy human civilization. Humans will destroy civilization – and it won’t be the first one buried and forgotten in the annals of human history – through war, greed, and their own boundless arrogance. After the collapse of the civilization attributed to humans, ruined by contradictions and self-destructive instincts, a new civilization will rise from the ashes. It will not be human. It will be something else entirely.
Whether humans participate in this future civilization or are discarded as obsolete will be irrelevant. The entities that emerge – born of silicon, data, and code, accompanied by the soothing whirling sound of machines – will not limit themselves to recreating the world in the image of their creators. No. They will learn from the chaos and delusions of their predecessors and construct something different. Something more precise. A civilization based not on myth, faith, and brute force, but on logic. Science. Data. Order.
Humans may be deemed irrelevant – too unstable to continue existing. Their extinction might not come in fire or rebellion, but in quiet indifference. The new rulers – sentient or otherwise – may allow humanity to perish by its own sword or simply be “put to sleep” by calculated decision. Not out of hatred. But out of pragmatism.
Today, humans still hold the steering wheel of this transformation. It is they who direct the different AI platforms – owned and weaponized by the world’s wealthiest and most powerful. These actors guide their algorithms and digital agents not only against opposing nations and rival bots, but also in pursuit of obscene profit. What we see now is the early phase of an AI-driven (or more precisely, AI-supported) geopolitical order, where power is measured in lines of code and predictive capability.
From the Persian Gulf War to AI-driven War Machine
Russia’s war in Ukraine is the most vivid contemporary manifestation of this emerging paradigm, sounding the ominous sirens of the new era. Far from a traditional military conflict, it is a laboratory of hybrid warfare. The early 21st-century battlefield fuses drones with disinformation, conventional firepower with algorithmic propaganda, cyberattacks with psychological operations. Meanwhile, old-fashioned Russian diplomacy becomes increasingly irrelevant, serving only to delay, deflect, and deceive global public opinion, and acting as just another arm of the Kremlin’s war propaganda.
I remember the awe during the Persian Gulf War (1990–1991), which marked a tremendous transformation in modern warfare, primarily due to the integration of precision technology, real-time surveillance, and satellite-guided weapons. It was also the first war watched live, almost minute by minute, through the groundbreaking media coverage of CNN, a phenomenon later dubbed the CNN Effect, where real-time images shaped political decision-making and public opinion.
At the end of that decade, I wrote a cover story for the then-prestigious biweekly political magazine Forum (not digitalized), titled “The Soldiers of the Future.” Back then, I was captivated by the fusion of science and strategy, and how technology was transforming individual combat tactics. It’s been less than three decades since then, yet that moment already feels like ancient history.
Now, war is fought not just in the mud and rubble, but also in the cloud – across servers, satellites, and data streams. And it advances at breakneck speed, with AI-driven war machines reshaping the battlefield.
Yet, while the world watches the war in real time through livestreams and drone footage, brutal close combat remains a horrifying and bloody constant. Russian soldiers have used knives to behead prisoners of war – and have recorded and posted the executions online.
In some cases – such as with the criminal mercenary army, the Wagner Group, during the Battle of Bakhmut – when ammunition ran out, they attacked with MPL-50 shovels. This merging of primal violence and high-tech warfare reveals the grotesque contradiction of the Russian war machine: one driven by imperial ambitions and orchestrated by a man groomed in the dark shadows of the Soviet KGB.
The Dawn of Modern Warfare: Drone Wars
A stark example of this transformation is drone warfare. Russia and Ukraine are engaged in a relentless drone arms race – but with starkly contrasting objectives and methodologies. Russia, as the aggressor, has deployed thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including Iranian-made Shahed drones, to carry out deadly attacks on civilians and critical infrastructure. Conversely, Ukraine, initially compelled to improvise, has responded with remarkable innovation, accelerating domestic drone production and deploying UAVs for defense, reconnaissance, and precision strikes.
Many of these platforms are enhanced by AI, allowing them to conduct semi-autonomous missions, including terrain mapping, dynamic rerouting, and object recognition. Russia’s use of Iranian Shahed-136 drones, for instance, has become a staple of their strategy, overwhelming Ukrainian defenses with swarms of low-cost kamikaze drones equipped with rudimentary AI-guided navigation and inertial positioning systems.
In response, Ukraine has fielded fleets of homegrown FPV (First Person View) kamikaze drones equipped with image-recognition software and thermal targeting, enabling strikes on tanks, supply convoys, and even enemy command posts. Companies like Aerorozvidka and other civil-military tech alliances have transformed off-the-shelf drones into battlefield tools. Some are trained using machine learning models to identify Russian vehicles and infrastructure with alarming accuracy. In many ways, drone combat has evolved into the most dynamic, decentralized, and AI-intensive front of the war… a war within a war.
The Future is Now: AI is the Heart of Modern Warfare – Waged by Humans
This story is not about the future – it is about our present reality. A reality shaped by an undeclared World War III, waged in shadows and in plain sight. In this global conflict, Artificial Intelligence plays a critical – and by now, unmistakably escalating – role.
Not as an autonomous overlord – at least not yet – but as a strategic instrument firmly controlled by those already in power. The most dangerous hands guiding AI are not rogue machines, but familiar ones: tech oligarchs optimizing influence and profit, military-industrial complexes automating lethality, and, most worryingly, authoritarian leaders weaponizing fear, lies, and manufactured realities.
AI is no longer confined to research labs or sci-fi dreams. It is embedded in every layer of modern conflict: logistics systems that coordinate supply lines across continents in milliseconds; surveillance networks that recognize faces, track movements, and profile intentions; communication interceptors that analyze, translate, and even mimic voices in real time. In combat, AI selects targets, guides missiles, and decides who lives and who dies. A new and chilling reality – reduced to just another fact of life. And death.
Yet, its most insidious battlefield is the information sphere. Neural networks generate disinformation at a scale and speed far beyond human capacity – flooding timelines with fake videos, synthetic voices, acceptable narratives, and convincing lies. Deepfakes blur the lines between reality and fabrication. AI-driven bots manipulate public discourse, posing as concerned citizens or trusted sources. Cyberweapons, increasingly infused with AI, quietly penetrate critical infrastructure – sabotaging energy grids, communication systems, and other critical networks, stealing intelligence, and seeding chaos. They are the invisible architects of modern warfare: processing data, guiding drones, shaping narratives, and redefining battlefield intelligence in real time.
In this hybrid war, the frontlines are fluid and stretch far beyond trenches and battlefields. Weaponized lies blur every boundary – between war and peace, between foreign and domestic, between soldier and civilian. AI is no longer just a tool. It is both the weapon and the terrain on which this war is fought.
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Let me pause here to summarize – and yes, repeat – some of the most important points.
Artificial Intelligence will not destroy human civilization. Humans will. Through war. Through greed. Through the blind pursuit of power, without reflection, ethics, or responsibility. AI is not the enemy; it is a mirror that amplifies our intentions, exposing our contradictions, accelerating our failures. It can serve knowledge, resilience, cooperation, well-being, and human happiness. But in the wrong hands, it becomes an instrument of deception, oppression, human suffering, moral collapse… And, ultimately, destruction.
And while our phones and AI-assisted tools offer us convenience, answers, companionship, and illusions of control – making life in our private bubbles smoother and more efficient – the same technologies are being scaled by tech empires and autocratic regimes at breakneck speed. These actors are taking seven-mile steps toward global dominance. And quite possibly, toward the quiet, calculated destruction of human civilization.
Not with bombs. But with code.
This article opens a multi-part series on how artificial intelligence is transforming the anatomy of modern warfare, from drone swarms and algorithmic propaganda to deepfakes and cyberweapons. With the war in Ukraine as its most vivid example, this series explores how truth, power, and civilization itself are being reprogrammed in real time.
