Artificial intelligence is frequently cited as a threat. As the Singularity. As killer robots. As the mass production engines of misinformation and social division. But what if there is another implacable threat to democracy dependent on none of these; one we are paying little attention to, and as a result one far more threatening to democracy as we understand it today?

Lieutenant Colonel Al Brown is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford. In addition to all the things one might expect in a twenty-year military career in the post-9/11 era, he was previously the lead for the UK military on the study of global trends in robotics and artificial intelligence and their impacts on conflict. He has been one of the group of government experts providing advice to and speaking at the United Nations, and a guest lecturer at various universities, the Royal United Services Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute.