Politics and Government

Technology

Mature

Lethal by Design

Military AI and the Crisis of Human ControlBy Andreas Hamberger

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Length10h 53m

About this audiobook

Since February 2022, Ukraine has become the first laboratory of mass autonomous warfare. Civilian engineers built first-person-view drones in garages and deployed them at scale before any procurement office had written a specification. Russia answered with Lancet loitering munitions that identify and strike armoured targets without a human in the decision loop. Iran's Shahed drones, built under sanctions for roughly $35,000 each, reached three continents. In Gaza, an AI targeting system processed thousands of names at speeds no legal review process was designed to match. None of this was authorised by any parliament. No electorate voted on it. No court has held anyone accountable for a single autonomous strike decision in any of these conflicts. Lethal by Design traces how we got here.

Artificial Intelligence

Audiobook details

GenrePolitics and Government, Technology

Length10 hrs 53 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

Publish dateMay 13, 2026

LanguageEnglish

1Dedication

21Chapter 14: The Doctrine of Acceptable Loss

2Preface

22Part VI: Iran and the Proliferation of Autonomous Lethality

3Part I: The Machine Before the Algorithm

23Chapter 15: The Shahed Assembly Line

4Chapter 1: Automation Before Intelligence

24Chapter 16: The Proliferation Network

5Chapter 2: DARPA and the Unmanned Horizon

25Chapter 17: Operation Epic Fury

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6Chapter 3: The Gulf War and the Precision Revolution

26Part VII: China’s Algorithmic Ambition

7Part II: The Drone Wars

27Chapter 18: Intelligentised Warfare

8Chapter 4: Predator

28Chapter 19: The Taiwan Calculus

9Chapter 5: Signature Strikes

29Part VIII: The Proving Grounds

10Chapter 6: Who Is Responsible When a Drone Kills?

30Chapter 20: The Algorithm of Attrition

11Part III: The Corporate Kill Chain

31Chapter 21: The Miracle of the South

12Chapter 7: When Google Went to War

32Part IX: The Ungoverned Battlefield

13Chapter 8: Palantir and the Industrialisation of Military AI

33Chapter 22: Voluntary Norms and the Failure of International Law

14Chapter 9: From Maven to Epic Fury

34Chapter 23: Red Lines

15Part IV: Ukraine

35Chapter 24: Bright Lines

16Chapter 10: The FPV Revolution

36Chapter 25: The Swarm

17Chapter 11: The Electronic Warfare Arms Race

37Chapter 26: Precise Mass and the End of Human Control

18Chapter 12: The Western Tech Stack in a War Zone

38Chapter 27: Democratic Accountability and the Lethal Machine

19Part V: Russia’s Autonomous War

39Epilogue

20Chapter 13: From Uran-9 to Lancet

40About the Author

About the author

Andreas Hamberger

Andreas Hamberger is an enterprise architect with over 30 years of experience in technology leadership and AI governance. He is the author of six books, including Space Mafia, Free As In Theft, and Lethal By Design, and writes The Hamberger Report, a weekly series on AI, ethics, and the open source movement. His work introduces the accountability gap framework for orbital AI, the Heaven Vector and Skynet Vector ethical model, and Te Pono V.E.R.A., an open-source verification framework for AI outputs.View all by Andreas Hamberger