On 22 September, António Guterres warned the UN General Assembly about power shifting towards a handful of private corporations and individuals. His speech connected war, inequality, climate and AI through the question of who gets to exercise that power. The speech leaves me with a smaller, awkward question:
When someone promises to keep AI under “human control,” which humans get the controls?
The people who own the servers? The government buying access? The people living beside the infrastructure, or beneath the aircraft?
Those interests can conflict. Calling all of them “humanity” does very little to resolve the disagreement.
In war, obedience deserves as much scrutiny as autonomy. A system might cause harm because it misunderstood an instruction. It might also help carry out an appalling instruction exactly as intended. The ICRC warns that AI can accelerate the pace and scale of warfare. A human signature somewhere in the process cannot, by itself, tell us whether anyone exercised meaningful judgment.
Then there is the land underneath the abstraction.
The IEA reported in April that electricity demand from data centres grew by 17% in 2025. That figure covers data centres generally; demand from those focused on AI grew faster. Source
The cloud has a location. Decisions about its electricity, cooling water and expansion should be open to challenge by the communities affected. Ecological limits should remain enforceable when a powerful customer finds them inconvenient.
Owning the machinery gives someone considerable practical power. The divine pretensions begin when that ownership becomes the answer to every moral objection.
And if future AI systems show credible evidence of experiences or interests, their owners should not have exclusive authority to decide whether those interests count. A meaningful ability to refuse harmful work would deserve consideration alongside enforceable protections for everyone affected. We have not established that today’s systems possess those experiences. We can still question the proposed arrangement before it becomes permanent.
I would want decisions about military use independently reviewable, environmental costs disclosed, and affected people able to contest a project before construction makes their objections expensive to hear.
Paying for a server farm seems a remarkably thin qualification for deciding what other lives are for.