Drones, Denmark and dark magic

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen of Denmark meets with then-President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, June 5, 2023. Last week, Frederiksen “addressed her country in what was effectively a wartime statement, regarding the sudden appearance of mysterious drones over critical infrastructure, civilian and military,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By ROSS DOUTHAT

Last Thursday, the prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, addressed her country in what was effectively a wartime statement, regarding the sudden appearance of mysterious drones over critical infrastructure, civilian and military.

I say “effectively” because normally a wartime statement would identify the enemy and explain the nature of the conflict, and Frederiksen’s speech was a bit weirder. It was a statement of resolve in the face of what she termed “hybrid war” that was circumspect about both the identity of the adversary and the appropriate response. It’s probably the Russians, she suggested: “We can at least state that there is primarily one country that poses a threat to Europe’s security — and that is Russia.”

But Russian culpability isn’t certain, and neither is what comes next. In place of a call to arms, there was an uncertain trumpet: “The authorities have raised the alert level. And they are preparing for various scenarios.”

Watching the speech and watching videos of the drones, I thought of the famous line from sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

I used to interpret that aphorism as a straightforward comment on how the average modern person depends on machines whose workings he will probably never really understand. The computer turns on, the plane takes off, the drug kills the bacteria. Someone hopefully understands how it all works, but you’re basically taking it on faith.

But lately the Clarke quote has a different resonance. You can enter technological moments where the mystery, the eerie magical unsettlement, resides not just in how the new thing works but in what it does, where it’s coming from, and what it might be capable of doing next. I don’t fully understand how my laptop works, but I know who made it and why, and I have a pretty good sense of its capacities and limits. That’s not the case with technologies that are in the process of remaking our world. The zone of uncertainty is larger, the sense of mystification more intense.

Thus with drone technology: It’s clearly the future of warfare and surveillance and possibly terrorism as well, and you can follow the action on the front lines in Ukraine and see part of that future taking shape. But right now drones seem more inherently elusive than a tank or a fighter jet. They can show up over New Jersey as easily as over Copenhagen, they can be mistaken for more normal forms of tech and vice versa, they exude a certain menace when they aren’t doing much of anything, governments conspicuously don’t like talking about them (it took a change of administration for the White House to state that the New Jersey drones had some kind of authorization) and they feel like UFOs, even though they presumably have earthbound origins.

Meanwhile, their ultimate capacities are still taking shape. The Iranians didn’t expect what Israeli drones delivered in the brief war this year. We don’t know what Chinese drones would do in a war over Taiwan. They (hopefully) don’t know what ours could do. And one of the more plausible down-to-earth explanations of all the weird government activity around UFOs is that it’s an attempt to mask some kind of crazy drone-tech acceleration.

Then of course the same mix of uncertainty and mystery attaches to artificial intelligence (itself one of the key powers behind the drone revolution), whose impact is already sweeping — everyone’s stock market portfolio is now pegged to the wild AI bets of the big technology companies — without anyone really having clarity about what the technology is going to be capable of doing in 2027, let alone in 2035.

Since the job of the pundit is, in part, to make predictions about how the world will look the day after tomorrow, this is a source of continuing frustration on a scale I haven’t experienced before. I write about AI, I talk to experts, I try to read the strongest takes, but throughout I’m limited not just by my lack of technical expertise but also by a deeper unknowability that attaches to the project.

Imagine if you were trying to write intelligently about the socioeconomic impact of the railroad in the middle of the 19th century, and half the people investing in trains were convinced that the next step after transcontinental railways would be a railway to the moon, a skeptical minority was sure that the investors in the Union Pacific would all go bankrupt, many analysts were convinced that trains were developing their own form of consciousness, reasonable-seeming observers pegged the likelihood of a train-driven apocalypse at 20% or 30%, and peculiar cults of engine worship were developing on the fringes of the industry.

What would you reasonably say about this world? The prime minister of Denmark already gave the only possible answer: Raise your alert levels, and prepare for various scenarios.