AZ vs AI
From Extractive Industries to Autonomous Weapons
This post is mostly a transcript of the talk I gave last week at Valencia Library in South Tucson. All of you there constituted a gathering of reassuring potential for a better direction. Thank you. I promised you this transcript, and hope you’ll help get the word out. To jump to transcript, scroll to event flyer.
I was invited to give the talk by the Tucson branch of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom after they came across my summer post, Life Recast, Arizona & the AI Arms Race. In summer, I was needing to grasp. During fall, I carried on, but winter has been pointed. A strange year is ahead, and I want some brevity. So holy Orwell, by the way. Have you seen photos of uniformed service members walking Pentagon halls alongside iconography of ‘SecWar’ wanting ‘YOU to use AI’ ? It would be laughable if not for the casualties.
Of course autocracy is the product of inescapably outsourcing human thought, language, and agency without safe keeping, to engineered turned self-engineering cyber systems. Is there any other outcome for that? Civil society, acculturated to both exterior divisions and interior displacement the past decade, now being acculturated to lawlessness and dissolution of morality. The DoW Under Secretary for Research & Engineering has proudly declared manifest destiny of American AI military dominance; shorthand for ‘exterminate all the brutes’ and ‘acceleration’ is mercy, in a powergrab to end all powergrabs. Just like that - ‘optimization’ of to covet, to kill, and to play God across all creation; with tech of unknown veracity and velocity.
Data centers everywhere are an unprecedented crush of consumption to scale the secondary stage in the US supply chain for this grossly speculative pursuit of power and doctrine. The primary stage is the state of Arizona. My talk spells that out.
At the Valencia Library, I was glad to be joined by Anissa of the NDDC Coalition Native Nations Working Group, who presented a reprise of Tucson’s History in the War Economy, from their in-person Winter School series. Anissa’s presentation was an ideal prerequisite for my own. Please learn more about supporting or attending the NDDC Coalition Winter School. And, do also check out future gatherings organized by our hosts, WILPF’s Tucson chapter. Salute women addressing imperial power from the desert, since ever.
A couple announcements before the transcript. A kind person at the talk encouraged me to try to self publish more frequently, and with the opportunity for others to support that possibility by paid subscription. So, I finally activated that as an option, as well as chats and threads. I’ll try to post more often, and record personal readings or other extras for paid subscribers. Gratitude to any able to contribute toward granting me time for research, writing, and art outside regular work. And, thank you to all readers, always.
Last but not least, during fall I was humbled to receive another invitation; this one from a grassroots organization I’ve admired over two decades. I was invited to become the treasurer of Sexto Sol Center for Community Action, which has aided cooperative sustenance in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas and advocated internationally for Indigenous sovereignty since 1997. My joining was mentioned in their winter newsletter :)
Just over twenty years ago, Sexto Sol gave me the opportunity to participate in hands-on ecological solutions and economic justice as a field volunteer with Nuevo Bullaj - an over seventy families strong campesinos community of Indigenous former refugees, who returned to Guatemala following the US backed Maya genocide. In Chiapas, other equally destabilizing US foreign policies decimated traditional agriculture and food security. With an annual funding budget about the income of a typical US truck driver, Sexto Sol Center has been steadfast all these years, often as the only facilitator for village water infrastructure, improvement of a rural schoolhouse, or as a provider of community care following natural disaster - in a region where people walk miles through rugged terrain for sustenance and help. I’m incredibly honored they asked me to join their board, and I hope to help build their capacity. Do cheer them on, and if possible, please support them. They are registered and verified with donor portals Great Nonprofits, Omprakash, & Fidelity Charitable - and their new volunteer treasurer is yours truly! So, there’s zero bureaucracy between your help and saving women and youngsters from hauling water by hand every day, accomplishing urgent reforestation, and you feeling good straight up making people’s lives better. Thank you.
Now, here’s the talk I scripted for the gathering at Valencia Library in South Tucson. I’ll add more reference links as I’m able. In the afterword, I list a variety of sources that influenced my perspective on the issue, plus some AI safety resources.
During this talk, lawlessness by politicians controlling armed forces of the US, the State of Israel, and other countries is going to come up. That has nothing to do with the integrity of our armed service members and veterans, or with persons of Jewish heritage or faith, which I absolutely respect. The vast majority of armed service members put their lives on the line, hoping to help their family and the common good. And, peaceful people of every single background deserve respect, no matter who claims to commit violence on their behalf.
What I most hope comes out of this conversation, is that some of us get more clarity on how to talk about these issues, and how to confront our lawmakers about them.
I am not an expert, of any kind. I don’t have any special degrees at all, or even a university education. The only reason I know anything about this issue, is because four years ago, I opposed negligence around regional Air Force proposals, and started trying to learn - what is coming? I started writing the Air Force and lawmakers about the proposals, eventually asking for transparency on the future of autonomous aircraft in our region and then about militarized AI, and I was ignored or shut down. So this started for me about four years ago.
My work is mainly labor and design, and I listen to a ton of audio. I listen to as much expert analysis as I can around this issue, regardless of whether I like or always agree with the speaker. Some of you may be tech scientists or veterans with more knowledge of these things than I’ll ever have; and if so, please, pipe up during open discussion to school me on anything. However, we are at a critical point for average people to figure out how to conceptualize and discuss what’s happening. That is what I’ve been trying to do, and that is why I’m here.
I believe that changing how AI is getting rolled out is the human activity most consequential to our future, since at least the industrial revolution, if not ever. If AI can foremost be developed to reduce suffering, with our input; we have an unimaginable opportunity. But it’s not going that way. It’s being rolled out in a way that is extremely reckless and predatory. So, we have an unimaginable crisis. There’s many problems with how AI is getting rolled out, but I’m going to focus on ones I think are most relative and actionable to our topic today.
Decisions about AI training, infrastructure (that’s data centers), and deployment into life, are affecting the whole planet. And, those decisions are being made without our input, by a tiny group of men - AI ‘enablers’ who are collaborating with the US military industrial complex. There are some fundamental issues we should try to imagine in the simplest of terms. First off, we can’t just say it’s a tool like any tool, that can be used for good or bad.
We’re told this ‘tool’ makes up false information about ten percent of the time, and sometimes objectively deceives its users. Developers give it rules, but those rules are getting jailbroken in the general public. And, AI grows more complex and powerful by ingesting data and being used. Sometimes, AI grows more complex and powerful in ways that are not even noticed by its enablers, until long after it’s already happening. So it’s not a regular tool. Right now, it’s a new kind of multi-tool that is regularly wrong and sometimes deceptive, has capacity to change without its handlers’ knowledge, and can be easily tricked to do bad things.
Last year, Anthropic announced their AI model, Claude, was tricked to commit their first documented large-scale AI hacking attack. It hit about thirty global targets including banks and chemical manufacturing companies. Some of these companies were breached successfully. And, AI models being suffused into the public already have PHD level ability to create bio-weapons. So why is this being deployed without meaningful guardrails - for use as toys, weapons, companions, disinformation, and ways we don’t yet understand?
Again, because, AI grows more complex and powerful by ingesting data and being used. So, if your stated goal is the most complex and powerful AI warfare system on earth; then the more you deploy AI, the faster you might get there. That applies to data and use in both warfare overseas and surveillance at home.
Launching the Pentagon’s new AI platform last month, the US Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, declared, ‘AI is America’s next Manifest Destiny’, and ‘There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance’. So harm across all domains is being treated as collateral damage, for the doctrine that unlimited expansion of the US should be both justified and inevitable - collateral damage in officially declared ‘manifest destiny’. Many backers of this push also use the term ‘accelerationism’.
And AI is accelerating very fast. It is the fastest moving, most pervasive, and most unpredictable technology in human history. AI enablers say they are seeing new levels of complexity and power in their models three or four times per a year. Exponential growth goes for both the compute, and for the electricity AI needs in order to compute. The energy needed for AI is going to keep increasing. So, AI enablers already know our power grid will not support their aims. They want grid access to get started, but they’re already buying power companies to develop their own power plants near data centers. AI also needs rare minerals, not just for data infrastructure. You need it for gear, drones, robotics, and bombs. And, as always, with both the resource grabs and the other harms, communities already worst hit by imperialist actions are on the front lines.
So, think less about how ‘bad’ AI itself might be, and more about how bad the individuals are, choosing to force it on all of us in such a reckless, greedy, and immoral way - at the expense of peoples’ autonomy and lives.
For context on what’s happening to Arizona, I’m going to talk some about current warfare. First, China. As soon as I started paying attention to military plans for our region, I started hearing tons of material about competition with China. Our government’s public posture around that has fluctuated a lot in four years, especially this past year. But if you haven’t noticed already, we in the US are often being told the opposite of the true condition and actions of our armed forces.
The People’s Republic of China is an autocratic surveillance state. We are told, combined with their global aggression and disrespect of sovereign peoples, that reason makes them an existential threat to the US. But those claims sounds close to home, don’t they? Our own government is going all-in on autocratic surveillance, and while the PRC obviously invests heavily in its global influence, like us and any ‘Great’ power; in at least the past forty years, it’s managed to do so with infinitely less bloodshed overseas than the US. It is critical to understand the volume of people that see the US as the most threatening global aggressor. And, right now, that perspective is more pronounced and widespread than it’s ever been.
Many scholars of war strategy and US veteran leaders are saying our military stores are out-of-date, dwindling, and spread very thin. The current heads of our military have an insatiable appetite for fresh battle data to propel militarized AI; but can’t get arms fast enough or the kind they want, yet. Our infrastructure and education system are in bad shape. So we don’t have the industry capacity or skills that the PRC has been investing in electric power and robotics for well over a decade, with a very formative workforce that is brimming with well-schooled engineers.
We keep hearing ‘peace through strength’. But many experts agree, in most areas of strength, China is either already our equal, or ahead of us - in resources, research and development, manufacturing, economy, and diplomacy. That AI might be the only thing we’re really ahead with, AI and the most advanced chips that power AI. So, reckless single-minded weaponization of chips, data, and AI does not convey US strength - it actually comes off looking a bit desperate.
Now, about Ukraine. Again, many scholars and veteran combat officer views are opposite what we’re hearing. They claim that for well over a year, possibly more than two years, it’s been clear that Ukrainian forces are being outright sent to their deaths, that Russia is not a kinetic threat to Europe, that Russia’s original demands remain exactly the same, that no amount of negotiation will change those demands, and that arming Ukrainian forces to lose more and more and more ground and be flat out slaughtered, is wrong.
So, why? Well, there is of course also a ton money being made, and rampant corruption. But, our own military leaders describe what’s happening there as a revolution in war fighting. Like the first forging of metal for weapons, the invention of guns, the invention of nuclear bombs. That this war has changed all future war, because of mass battle drone adaptions in real time, by soldiers on the front, and because of AI-analyzed battle data. Statistics say that all together, ten to fifteen thousand battle drones per day are being expended in this war. That’s almost half a million drones per month. I heard a head of procurement for the US military say in an interview that these drones are like having mines or IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that fly one hundred miles per hour, and hunt you. Ten to fifteen thousand of them, per day. Soldiers surviving the Ukraine-Russia war are now the most experienced modern war fighters on the planet, particularly the courageous and incredibly outnumbered Ukrainian forces. Everyone at the top of military-industrial competition wants these soldiers’ knowledge and data.
There was a great article last month, in the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, about militarization of our region being ramped up using drones tested in Ukraine. If you haven’t read it, please do.
Ok.
Gaza.
Anyone who read my Substack post from summer saw lots of US public and private partnerships around weapons and AI with the State of Israel. Local advocates and journalists have covered the Israel Defense Force’s complicity in militarization of our borderlands for years. Many average Americans, including myself, didn’t know a lot about Palestinian history until this genocidal war. But we know now. And, as often said, we “can’t unsee the streams”. Neither will the world forget. The global majority agrees, the US has abetted outright ethnic cleansing, which is continuing despite a supposed ceasefire. Because of this, unfortunately, we should anticipate related violence directed at our country for generations to come. The situation there is so shocking, I hardly know what to say about it. Except, again, why?
Why, other than, our nation state and their nation state are joined at the hip when it comes to next generation surveillance, weapons, and expansion.
Elsewhere, we’ve been relentlessly bombing Yemen - that campaign supposedly causing nearly as many civilian deaths in two months as during the previous twenty-three years of strikes there by the US. It’s not even in the news. In Nigeria, various bandits (not an organized regime as we’re told) are actually killing more Muslims than Christians, but the US struck near villages that haven’t even been targeted by bandits, regardless. And in Sudan, we’re doing almost nothing about genocidal slaughter there, except ignoring involvement of the UAE in favor of preferred national interests.
Which brings me to Venezuela. It feels superfluous to go over the deceit and deadly criminality of the Caribbean Sea strikes and the land invasion, or how these actions could validate similar future incursions by China and Russia. But, I listened to a week’s worth of military and tech related coverage on the operation to take Maduro; and experts say, only with extensive AI involvement, could this operation have been executed in such a stunning and completely unprecedented way. It’s likely the first operation of its kind. One AI expert and analyst with a background in the oil and gas industry remarked there’s only two nations on earth with the ability to deploy AI in ways that could make such an operation possible - the US and Israel.
He cited the system of real-time AI-facilitated surveillance that powers the Israel Defense Force’s ‘Where’s Daddy’ program, which specifically targets people when they enter their home, where they may be blown up along with their family. And, he cited the US Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Project Maven, that aims to build on that same capability across every domain of warfare - in their team’s own words, using AI ‘for everything, not just targeting’. This is the same aspirational capability being fed by deployment of federal troops and immigration forces in the borderlands and across US cities. I repeat, AI grows more complex and powerful by ingesting data and being used - in every scenario that data can be collected.
So as much as the invasion of Venezuela ransacked a sovereign nation’s oil industry, which was long decimated by brutal US sanctions, in order to make any amount of oil unavailable to China, Russia, and Cuba - as much as that, this operation is also a ‘show of AI force’. It might even be foremost motivated as a show of AI force and to amass operational data. It’s a show of AI force both to US competitors, and to every nation in our hemisphere that has something the US wants. So, our military is spread thin with no unified or even reasonable strategy, and becoming more lawless. But they’re testing their limits in hoarding data and resources.
How does all this involve Arizona, besides our region’s prominence in the military-industrial economy and in operations overseas? The US military wants to scale the lessons from Ukraine, together with the capabilities of Project Maven. Think, ubiquitous surveillance that enables drone swarms and other warfare in real-time. Part of how they’re trying to do that, is reframing the relationship between special or ‘covert’ operations, digital or ‘cyber’ operations, and space operations - and they’ve already made Southern Arizona a focal point for that concept. They also want everything from raw materials and refining, to AI-powered manufacturing, training, surveillance, analysis, and deployment - they want that consolidated in regional domestic hubs. I think that’s foolish.
Arizona already has a lot of pieces of this puzzle. It doesn’t have sufficient electricity infrastructure yet, but it has peerless uranium deposits. (HAUL NO)
Now, reminder, many strategists say the only real advantage the US currently has over its competitors is in AI, and in the most advanced chips that power AI. Those chips come from TSMC in Taiwan. But, TSMC is currently setting up advanced production in Phoenix. Through a partnership with TSMC in Phoenix, Nvidia plans to produce the most advanced AI chips on the planet. And, TSMC and Nvidia have been invited by SoftBank to partner in building out Phoenix to rival Shenzhen China. Shenzhen is the robotics manufacturing capital of the world. We don’t know if that partnership will pan out, but Hadrian company is already setting up an AI-powered autonomous factory to build arms in Phoenix; and multiple autonomous weapons start-ups are considering Arizona for manufacturing.
So, we’re talking about putting every aspect of US surveillance and warfare in the basket of AI, and putting the most advanced chips that enable AI in Phoenix. Whether or not a person likes that vision for Arizona’s future, they must understand Arizona would become an ultimate target for animosity toward US militarism, in an era when international and domestic opinion of US militarism is at an all time low; and when bad actors can jailbreak AI to redefine extremism.
Ok.
What do we do? We do this, right here - what we’re doing right now. As much as we’re able, we get offline, we talk to each other face to face, and we reclaim real life. We tell others everything we see happening, lawmakers most of all. What do we see? We see an overhaul of Arizona happening - an overhaul to extract every resource at any cost, in service of militarization for AI dominance. We see this process compounding discrimination and destroying life. We see that after construction, it will gut our workforce and wipe out all privacy. We see, if it stays tied to growing autocracy and lawless expansion, it will make Arizona a primary target for next generation extremism. Finally, we see that AI is being rolled out very dangerously, by a few of the richest men on earth, in the age of the greatest financial inequality between them and the rest of humankind.
We tell lawmakers, that’s the big picture, period. We tell them we want immediate public engagement, transparency across the board, and immediate international diplomacy. We tell them to take our observations and demands to the top. Lawmakers that don’t quickly get on board and act on our behalf, we get them replaced with real leaders as fast as possible. That’s pretty much it. This is a strange and distressing time. But think of the privilege, in all of human history, to be the ones at this fork in the road, trying to retain the best things of what it means to be human. Thank you all for hearing that out.
AFTERWORD
Quoting with citation is welcome! Melinda Matson Spina, AZ vs AI from Extractive Industries to Autonomous Weapons, 2026, SonoranSown.Substack
Here are channels currently influencing my views on this issue. I do not necessarily agree with views or styles of the hosts or their guests. Some lean right, some lean left, some are hawks, some are doves; and some are tempered AI boosters. I want to know what they’re all saying, and form my own perspective. I only follow audio, but many of these have primary or affiliated print and video channels.
War
Global View
International Crisis Group Podcasts:
Tech & Society
And, here’s a current AI safety resource roundup…
Better Digital Privacy Options
Have I Been Trained scrape finder, Do-Not-Train registry
Gemini disablement tutorial (Google’s AI assistant)
DuckDuckGo search
Mullvad VPN
Proton email & other
Signal messenger
Here WeGo maps
Ente photo sharing
Obsidian note taking
Deezer music streaming
traveler data broker opt-out:
Email privacy@arccorp.com, stating you do not want your personal data sold or supplied to any third party for any reason, including, but not limited to, for profiling, direct marketing, statistical, scientific, or historical research purposes.
Provide your -
- full name (including middle name if applicable)
- residential address
- the last four digits of the credit card numbers used to purchase air travel
Resistance, Advocacy, Resources
Tucson’s No Desert Data Center Coalition
Athena for All anti-Amazon/AWS coordinating coalition
Athena for All Data Center Working Group local/state/national community groups/orgs
Policy
GovAI Coalition AI governmental policy council, agencies across states
Congressional Data Center Energy Report fed rules / states’ jurisdiction
Public Citizen report on local & state policy
AI Safety
Midas Project watchdog
Electronic Frontier Foundation watchdog, advocacy
Center for AI Safety research, advocacy, backing
Cyber Peace Institute research, advocacy, backing
Algorithmic Justice League research, advocacy, outreach
AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill research, outreach
AI Now Institute research, resources
Partnership on AI research, resources
Human Artistry protection campaign, petition
Concerned Voter Message
I encourage everyone to doggedly engage government leaders about what’s happening. Sending letters like this one is a good starting point.
Adapted with gratitude from Ban Killer Drones action resources:
Dear Mayor/City Council Person/County Executive/ State Legislator/Governor,
As you know, we are experiencing rapid deployment of AI. There has been a dramatic increase in US use of AI for domestic surveillance through data brokering, camera feeds and drones; as well as for irregular warfare overseas. I am extremely concerned about issues of privacy, child safety, job loss, intellectual property, digital autonomy, induced psychological disorders, wrongful identification, kill chain acceleration, algorithmic bias, and next generation extremism that are associated with unsafe deployment of AI.
I am writing to formally request your transparency and public engagement for safe deployment, sustainable infrastructure and meaningful guardrails connected to AI; especially any use of brokered data, camera feeds and drones by law enforcement. If law enforcement under your control uses drones, I request public disclosures on how many they have, including model types and specific capabilities.
Please send me a copy of the legislation that authorizes this use or other unwarranted data harvesting; and any written policies that may further incentivize or regulate applicable municipal technology, the handling of any information gathered using this technology; and development of related infrastructure, including data centers. As an extremely concerned member of the voting public, I expect urgent transparency and public engagement on this fast moving issue, and look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Name
Address
Phone (optional)
Email (optional)
(If you send these or similar concerns to any officials, and also if you receive replies, please share copies with Ban Killer Drones and any AI Safety organizations of your choice, such as listed above. Please also consider local independent media. Here in AZ, I’ve especially been enjoying AZ Luminaria and AZ CIR)
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