Somewhere on the front lines of the Russian-Ukrainian war, in the spring of 2026, swarms of autonomous drones, piloted by onboard AI, neutralized several Russian infantry units without a single Ukrainian soldier risking his life.
This is part of a process dating back several millennia: Humans have never ceased to transfer to a manufactured object what their bodies cannot accomplish as well on their own.
First, in the earliest forms of artificialization, the stick became a lever, the carved stone became a knife, the wheel multiplied muscular strength, the watermill replaced the slave grinding grain, and then the steam engine gave rise to industry. At the same time, agriculture began, as early as the Neolithic era, a radical artificialization of the environment: humans created plant and animal species that would never have existed without them—artifacts. We have seen the emergence of genetically modified seeds, hydroponic greenhouses, factory farms where animals never see the sky, and vertical farms where vegetables grow in urban warehouses, miles away from any natural soil. Japanese and Dutch laboratories are even producing synthetic nutrient substrates that, they say, allow for cultivation without humus, without earthworms, without geological history.
The third wave of artificialization, which is beginning now, is the widespread robotization of life: AI, which will be amplified by neuroscience, is replacing the brain. Robotics is replacing the body.
For the past decade, we have viewed AI with wonder and apprehension, forgetting that a robotic revolution was advancing in parallel within factories, warehouses, and logistics hubs. By 2025, more than a million industrial robots had been installed, primarily in China, Japan, and Korea, for reasons that were primarily demographic. These humanoid machines are now capable of working in environments hostile to humans, climbing stairs, handling fragile objects, and adapting to the unexpected.
For the past twenty years, Toyota, Honda, SoftBank, and dozens of lesser-known startups have developed robots for rice paddies, drones, autonomous tanks, automated recognition systems, and tools for predictive analysis of enemy movements.
Machines are thus gradually replacing assembly-line workers, taxi drivers, supermarket cashiers, accountants, financial analysts, soldiers, and, to some extent, journalists and lawyers; Care robots assist the elderly with their daily activities; they speak, recognize faces, memorize preferences, and detect distress signals (a change in heart rate, a shift in vocal tone, an unusual posture). They alert, comfort, and remind. An artificial seal with synthetic fur comforts Alzheimer’s patients; AI applications provide psychological support to millions of users who lack access to a human therapist. Personalized AI tutors (which adapt the pace, teaching style, and difficulty level to each student in real time) have already outperformed traditional teaching in certain learning areas, according to several controlled studies. AI-generated novels are published under human names with great success, without readers or critics detecting the deception. Algorithmically generated musical compositions move hundreds of millions of people on streaming platforms. Visual works produced by AI are winning art competitions.
And even more: robots are building robots; in China, robotic complexes are continuously producing robots without any human presence in the production workshops; AI systems are now capable of improving other AI systems. The design process itself is beginning to be delegated to machines.
On the horizon lie robots capable of reprogramming themselves, improving themselves, generating new capabilities, and creating new architectures, without human intervention at any stage of the process, creating radically new robots according to principles their human creators could never have imagined. Robots will give birth to robots.
Within this dynamic of the robotization of life, three major trajectories are possible.
- Consent to servitude: Robots, AI, and autonomous systems will take on an increasing proportion of human tasks. All of humanity will then gradually find itself in the position of the idle aristocracy of past centuries: served, comfortable, freed from labor, and gradually stripped of meaning. Progress, innovation, history, and the future will no longer belong to humanity.
- Rampant polarization: Robotization will create an absolute divide between the very few humans who will own and control autonomous systems (particularly those related to food, entertainment, and domination) and the rest, who will have nothing left to offer in a labor market that no longer needs them.Social violence will reach its peak; the rise of technophobic populism will trigger struggles for the redistribution of wealth of unprecedented brutality, while ecological disasters caused by this widespread artificialization will multiply.
- Augmented Democracy: In this scenario, the extraordinary productivity of autonomous systems will be distributed equitably through taxation, shared ownership, a universal basic income, and a radical reduction in working hours; it will be harnessed to serve the well-being of a humanity liberated to experience, generation after generation, connection, meaning, spirituality, love, politics in its noblest sense, and authentic creation, in harmony with the rest of the living world.
This third scenario would require the immediate establishment of regulations for corporations whose power exceeds that of most states, as well as global governance of AI, neuroscience, and robotics. The current world—blind, narcissistic, and divided—makes it difficult to imagine.