Article
Fear is Useful: AI and Robotics as a Threat to Our Freedom and Security
Many people today fail to grasp the risks that come with the rapid advancement of AI and robotics. It is time to ask the hard questions: What scenarios await us in the future? How do we prepare for them, and how should we respond?
The first step in addressing any potential problem is acknowledging it. So I ask: what if physical control—or even elimination—carried out by AI-powered robots stops being just a sci-fi concept?
I wish I could dismiss this question as absurd and irrelevant, but I know that ignoring it or downplaying its significance will not protect us from future dangers or the loss of personal freedom.
We already have systems where AI assists in managing drones, military operations, and real-time behavioural analysis. But what if, tomorrow, a drone is hovering outside your balcony? It will not have moral dilemmas, will not feel remorse, and will not question an order. And that is assuming it even needs an order at all. If such technology falls into the wrong hands, who will stop it? Do we truly believe that our law enforcement agencies will be able to protect us from swarms of small, autonomous flying objects when the development and production of such technology are becoming cheaper and increasingly accessible? Today, terrorists must risk their freedom and lives. Technology can make terrorism anonymous, pushing it into an entirely new dimension.
The next step is a world where systems and machines make decisions on their own. But what does “decision-making” even mean in the context of AI? It is not just about following an instruction—it is about choosing between multiple options, often based on data that humans cannot even see, let alone understand. And when these decisions happen within milliseconds, is any kind of external intervention even possible?
Join the Library
Full access to my thoughts, personal stories, findings, and what I learn from the people I meet.
Join the Library — €29.99 per yearGet the full article by email and feel free to reply if you want to discuss it further.
Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
Are autonomous drones already being used in warfare?
Could autonomous weapons make decisions without human oversight?
Is there an international treaty regulating autonomous weapons?
How accessible is military drone technology becoming?
Could AI be used to develop biological weapons?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
Related articles
The more I think about it, the more I realize what a fundamental issue this is.
No matter how I look at the future, I see very few answers and far too many questions and problems.
It is real, growing, and potentially devastating.
More articles
Prague, 13 May 2026. On my way to work I started thinking about something that stayed with me for days. If most routine work on a computer disappears in the next ten years, and a large share of repetitive manual work disappears with it, what happens to the flow of money? Who pays whom for what? Which economic layers will exist, how large will they be, and what relationships will run between them? This is the six-layer map I sketched as an answer.
I am building an AI system to predict the S&P 500. It runs on my own machine, uses free public data — yfinance, FRED, the Shiller dataset — and grades every forecast against reality. This series documents the build itself: the decisions, the methodology, the mistakes. What I will eventually share from the running system is a separate question, and an honest one.
Yesterday I could not tear myself away from the computer. When I lifted my head, it was half past eight in the evening. I had been sitting alone upstairs for about three hours.
Will AI take my job? A certified Google trainer told me in June 2024 that my profession would cease to exist. Twenty-two months later, my job title has not changed — but ninety percent of what I do during the day is different. I have delegated more of my thinking to AI agents than I thought possible. I am not afraid. This is why, and what it means for anyone asking the same question.
One hour. Fifty-five minutes. That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A working tool — the one the company actually needed. By the evening of the same day, it was running on staging. This is not about Claude Code. It is about what Claude Code exposes.
I have conducted roughly one hundred and fifty practical interviews over the past four years. Fifty for data specialist roles. A hundred for advertising and performance marketing specialists. Almost every one of them involved sitting down with a candidate over a practical task — something close to a real problem we actually need to solve at the company. Not theory. Not trivia. Applied problem-solving. Over time, I started noticing a pattern.
Before you can teach AI to understand anything, you need to see what it is hiding from you.
The moment other people needed access to it, the problem changed completely. It was no longer about whether the agent could learn. It was about who gets to teach it.
I wanted to build an agent that doesn't just assist. One that acts.
This is what I learned about local vs cloud AI, and why I switched to Claude Code.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.