Autopilot
Part 1: How governance migrated from laws to systems
Most people think governance is carried out in parliament, leading to the many controversial speeches, predictable scandals, and questionable elections that continuously fill the news cycle. And that, indeed, is the visible layer.
But for decades, a second layer has been established in parallel. While the first layer involves debate, the second one involves systems considered neutral and objective. And this shift represents something far more significant than technology merely getting faster. It marks a change in the nature of power itself.
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Consider the difference between law and infrastructure. Laws are interpretable and contestable by design — that’s the whole point of courts and appeals and legislative revision. Infrastructure, by contrast, is operational and largely inescapable by design. You don’t debate a passport control; you either have a passport or you don’t.
What’s being assembled now, piece by piece and sector by sector, is a system that senses the world, models it, sets thresholds, and enforces those thresholds through chokepoints — certification bodies, procurement requirements, financial access, platform terms of service, payment systems. The system then updates those thresholds based on feedback and repeats the cycle.
At planetary scale, wrapped in the language of environmental stewardship and global coordination, this becomes the ‘Spaceship Earth’ idea made operational. Not Spaceship Earth as Buckminster Fuller’s poetic metaphor, but Spaceship Earth with an autopilot — a distinct, anticipatory type of governance in its own right.
What makes this architecture particularly durable is that it doesn’t depend on whether any particular justification narrative is true. The story that legitimises the system can change while the mechanism itself stays in place.
Science as Government
Before modern computers were common, and long before anyone was talking about AI, the governing premise was already stated plainly: science should steer society.
That was the message of the 1941 conference held in war-torn London, Science and World Order. It represents an early moment where the argument was put cleanly on the table: the modern world is too complex for ordinary politics to manage; expert knowledge must therefore guide political decisions; and planning must be systematic, rational, and scalable.
Once that premise is accepted, democracy doesn’t necessarily get abolished — but it does get demoted. Debate gradually becomes tolerated friction, useful for legitimacy theatre but not ultimately decisive. The real work shifts into what gets called ‘administration’, ‘coordination’, ‘planning’, and ‘management’. Governance becomes, in short, an engineering project.
The Steering Mechanism Came Next: Ethics
Science alone, however, can’t govern humans. Science can describe what is, forecast what might happen, and optimise toward a stated goal. But it cannot supply the philosophical ‘ought’ — it cannot tell you what you should, or must, do.
That’s why the 1942 correspondence event, Science and Ethics, sits at the heart of this machine. Ethics serves as the converter that turns expert claims into obligations. It supplies the moral vocabulary — terms like ‘responsibility’, ‘stewardship’, ‘safety’, and ‘solidarity’. It supplies the legitimacy frame — words like ‘trustworthy’, ‘aligned’, ‘inclusive’, and ‘sustainable’. And it creates a social gradient where compliance becomes associated with virtue and resistance with irresponsibility.
This isn’t philosophy floating above society. It’s the mechanism by which constraint comes to feel like moral maturity, the process through which a technical programme becomes experienced as a public duty.
Once you have science positioned as the epistemic authority and ethics positioned as the moral imperative, you have the justification layer needed to govern without constant democratic consent. The trick is that this doesn’t present itself as tyranny — it presents itself as management, as adulthood, as the responsible, perhaps even urgent thing to do.
‘Ethics’, in this sense, becomes the way science is presented to the public.
Environmentalism Provided the Perfect Carrier
For this kind of system to achieve global reach, it needs an objective — something large enough to justify planetary coordination, technical enough to require expert management, and morally compelling enough to recruit public support.
Environmentalism was a perfect fit for this role.
This is not a claim about whether environmental science is right or wrong — that debate is secondary. What matters is that environmentalism defines a planetary problem-space that cannot, by its nature, be solved locally, and therefore ‘requires’ transnational institutions, standardised measurement, continuous monitoring, expert models, and managed behaviour change. It turns the planet into a managed unit.
This is why the 1968 UNESCO biosphere conference matters so much in this trajectory. If you read the administrative recommendations that came out of that conference, they read like a blueprint for planetary management — written decades before modern computing made such management technically feasible. Besides the ICSU and IUCN, the conference was organised in partnership with the World Health Organisation, and Recommendation 3 explicitly linked environmental disruption to public health: research should address ‘the ecology of human diseases, with special reference to those associated with environmental change and to the zoonotic diseases arising from interactions between man and animals’. The frame that would later justify pandemic governance — human imbalance with nature as the source of zoonotic spillover — was present at the origin.
Strip away the rhetoric, and the administrative requirements are straightforward: (1) standardise the world into data using common methods and categories; (2) build a sensing grid of monitoring stations and remote sensing systems for continuous data collection; (3) store and exchange that data globally through compatible systems and regional networks; (4) hand it to systems analysts who can model the biosphere as a controllable system; (5) train the professionals, teachers, and leaders who will transmit this framework; (6) educate the public through mass media until the frame becomes common sense; and (7) update policy continuously through ongoing adjustment rather than one-off legislation.
That is autopilot logic, written down decades before today’s infrastructure caught up with the vision.
What Autopilot Actually Is
Most people hear ‘autopilot’ and imagine a sci-fi control room filled with screens and technicians. But that’s not how it works in practice.
Autopilot is better understood as a loop: sense, model, decide, enforce, update. The system collects standardised data about people, firms, land, supply chains, and compliance status. It converts that data into risk scores, predictions, targets, and ratings. It translates those scores into thresholds that determine who is eligible and who isn’t, who gets approved and who gets denied, what counts as safe and what doesn’t. It applies those thresholds through gates — certification requirements, procurement rules, financial access, platform permissions, payment conditions. And then it monitors the outcomes and tightens or loosens the thresholds accordingly, repeating the cycle.
To be precise: autopilot means automated execution. Politics doesn’t disappear — it retreats to parameter-setting. The question is no longer ‘what should be done?’ but ‘what should the thresholds be?’ And that question gets answered far from public view.
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision sets global capital thresholds in closed sessions; minutes are not public. The IPCC’s Working Group I drafts climate thresholds, but the Summary for Policymakers is line-edited by government delegates. The IEEE neuroethics framework is drafted by working groups where tech companies hold voting membership. These aren’t shadowy conspiracies — they’re standard institutional practice. The opacity is structural.
When the system adjusts based on results, that’s management by feedback. When it acts on predictions before anything has actually happened, that’s management by forecast; anticipatory governance.
The key test for whether you’re looking at autopilot governance is simple: if the outputs of a model change what you are allowed to do, then that model isn’t ‘advice’ by any legitimate definition.
No Punishment Needed
A deeper pattern explains why this form of governance is so effective, and it has to do with where enforcement happens.
Think of a gatekeeper that doesn’t need to own your life — it only needs to decide what gets through. Historically, financial clearinghouses (the institutions that settle transactions between banks) have concentrated enormous power precisely because they sit at the bottleneck. Modern governance has copied that architecture and extended it across every domain.
The logic works like this: if you want to operate, you must get approved; if you want approval, you must be certified; if you want certification, you must comply; and if you don’t comply, you aren’t punished in any traditional sense — you’re simply excluded.
This represents a fundamental shift from punishment to exclusion as the primary mode of social control. It’s cleaner than law because it doesn’t need police. It uses what may be the most powerful enforcement mechanism in modern society: denial of participation.
And because exclusion-based governance presents itself as ‘technical’ rather than political, it’s sold as neutral infrastructure — as safety, trust, quality assurance, system stability. Meanwhile, it quietly produces a reality where what matters isn’t your rights in theory but your access status in practice.
When the Score Becomes the Policy
Once governance becomes a system, it needs a universal language that systems can enforce. That language turns out to be measurement by means of surveillance.
Results-Based Management has become the operating grammar of modern institutions. The pattern is familiar: define objectives, choose indicators (such as the SDG Indicators), set targets, verify performance, release funding. In plain English, you only get paid when the numbers say you performed.
Once institutions run on that grammar, performance metrics stop being measurement and become policy. People stop managing reality and start managing the score. If you’ve ever watched a workplace transform into a world of dashboards and targets — where hitting the number matters more than doing the work well — you’ve seen this template in action.
And once that mentality becomes normal, the next step follows naturally. If you can make funding conditional at the programme level, you can make transactions conditional at the payment level. That’s where conditional payment enters the picture: money only moves when the system confirms that specified conditions have been met. The same logic that has always controlled who clears in finance is written into the payment itself.
The Pivot: Emergency as System Output
In ordinary political language, an emergency is something that happens to you. It’s external, discrete, and undeniable. That framing preserves space for disagreement; ‘Is this really an emergency?’ remains a legitimate political question that citizens can debate.
But in the architecture being built, ‘emergency’ becomes something different — it becomes something the system produces, a label generated according to the system’s own criteria.
Criteria are defined inside the system; those criteria get assessed by models maintained inside the system; activation happens through pre-specified protocols; and termination occurs when the system declares the mode has ended. The political question doesn’t get answered ‘no’ — it doesn’t get asked at all. By the time anyone could contest the trigger, the switch has already flipped and the protocols are running. The burden of proof inverts: now you must prove the emergency isn’t real, and you must do so against the full weight of the machinery that declared it.
This is why the UN Emergency Platform proposal matters in this trajectory. It would formalise this switch — creating the mechanism that moves the system from an advisory posture to coordinated authority.
The system doesn’t even need to fabricate emergencies. It only needs thresholds calibrated so that the ordinary turbulence of a complex world periodically crosses them. Climate variability, pathogen evolution, financial volatility, cyber incidents, supply chain disruptions — these are all continuous phenomena. They become ‘shocks’ when the model says a threshold has been breached.
So the question ‘who controls the parameters?’ isn’t paranoid. It’s foundational. In a regime like this, the parameters are the law.
And if those parameters are technically opaque, institutionally insulated, and adjustable without public process, then you have a system that can select when to enter emergency mode without ever appearing to choose.
That’s autopilot — not because someone is flying the plane maliciously, but because the plane is being flown by thresholds, and thresholds can always be moved.
Why This Keeps Accelerating
Once governance is built into systems, humans become the expensive, slow, and inconsistent part of the loop.
Systems are cheaper than people. They’re faster than politics. They’re easier to audit than discretion. And once standards align across sectors, the same logic scales everywhere.
So the deployment pattern repeats: digitise the workflow, standardise the criteria, automate triage and enforcement, push humans to handle only the exceptions, and then eventually model the exceptions too.
This is why job destruction under automation doesn’t feel like a one-time shock. It feels like an endless wave — not one dramatic replacement, but continuous surface-area reduction, one workflow at a time.
But it isn’t only jobs that become redundant. It’s also the parts of democracy that assume decisions remain contestable. Because once governance is embedded in procurement contracts, technical standards, accreditation requirements, software systems, and payment infrastructure, reversal no longer looks like winning an election. It looks like dismantling infrastructure.
And the infrastructure resists dismantling. Procurement contracts lock in for years. Vendors build to the prevailing standard, and then that standard becomes the only game in town. Compatibility requirements mean everyone adopts the same format, and once everyone uses the same format, opting out means opting out of participation itself. International alignment means a rule change in one country requires renegotiation across dozens. The system doesn’t need to be defended politically — it just needs to be expensive and slow to undo.
By the time the political will exists to reverse course, the cost of reversal exceeds the cost of compliance. That’s how lock-in works: not by force, but by friction.
A Question That Matters
If you compress this entire argument into a single line, it’s this: we’re building a society where rules aren’t debated and voted on; they’re encoded, audited, and enforced at the point of access.
The political battle in such a system isn’t really left versus right, and it isn’t even ‘what is your policy?’ It’s simpler and more fundamental: who sets the parameters?
Because in an automated governance stack, the parameters are the law. And if the parameters are set by institutions you cannot remove, enforced by infrastructure you cannot escape, and triggered by models you cannot interrogate, then ‘self-government’ becomes a ritual performed above an operating system you don’t control.
That is Spaceship Earth with autopilot.
It didn’t happen because someone announced it. It’s happening because the parts required for autopilot — (1) science as the epistemic authority, (2) ethics as the moral imperative, (3) planetary stewardship as the carrier objective (whatever one thinks of the underlying claims), (4) systems thinking as the method, (5) measurement as the universal language, (6) gatekeeping as enforcement, (7) conditional payment as the final lever, and (8) emergency-as-system-output as the on-switch — are being installed piece by piece until the loop runs on its own.
And once it runs, you don’t get asked whether you even want the autopilot enabled. You discover it when the system stops clearing your cheques.
In part 2, we’ll discuss how this is being implemented in practice.
Really comprehensive breakdown of how governance moved from legislative visibility to infrastructual inevitability. The UNESCO biosphere conference connection to zoonotic framwork is particularly sharp—that wasn't just foresight, that was layering in the public health justifcation decades before the mechanism could run at scale. I remember during lockdowns thinking "how did this coordination happen so fast" and the answer is it didnt; the plumbing was already there. The parameter control question is the right one to push; once enforcement is conditional access rathr than punishment, reversal becomes unaffordable.
Also in 1941 the Council on Foreign Relations (US Chatham House) published the following piece in its Foreign Affairs magazine. It's as if they laid out the stakes, identifying where it would lead (a little global war along the way or not) and the conscious decision to ignore the cautions it provided was made.
Science in the Totalitarian State
Foreign Affairs, January, 1941
https://web.archive.org/web/20181125112623/https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1941-01-01/science-totalitarian-state
(Selected Excerpts)
"The totalitarian conception of the relation of science to the state is remarkably elastic. When political expediency so determines, the whole concept is modified. "
"This Nazi and Soviet pursuit of "rebels" may seem absurd, but actually it is logical. An artist or a scientist in Germany and in Russia serves the state. He therefore cannot separate his politics from his strictly professional activities. If he departs from the prevailing official ideology he automatically becomes an anti-Nazi in Germany and a counter-revolutionary in the Soviet Union."
"It was also charged that Soviet materialistic works on cosmology "have been suppressed by the enemies of the people." In other words, because Marx and Engels were saturated in Victorian materialism, which followed Newton in picturing the universe as a colossal machine instead of a problem in higher geometry, all the experimental and observational evidence that supports relativity must be rejected.
How does science like this tyranny? A few bold spirits still survive in Germany and Russia, but, on the whole, there is a remarkable pliancy of the scientific mind in both countries."
"The Russian gift of recantation, which marked the trials of Party members accused of adherence to Trotsky, manifests itself in science as well as in politics.
Back of the ideologies of the dictators, back of the professional pliancy, is something more than political expediency, something more than blind obedience. Long before the world ever heard of Mussolini and Stalin and Hitler it was in a state of social unrest. The revolutions that overthrew the Romanoffs and the Hohenzollerns, the upheavals that gave British labor new rights and privileges, were expressions of dissatisfaction with the social structure. To say that the dictators emerged because science and technology had taken possession of society and stamped it with a pattern utterly different from that which the égalitarians of the eighteenth century knew is an over-simplification. There are psychic factors that cannot be ignored -- inner drives, national traditions, habits of life. Yet if the dictators are to be overthrown, if democracy is to be preserved, the part that science and technology played in the rise of democracy cannot be ignored. Research produces not only change within science itself but social change. The democratic method is to adapt social change to technological change. The dictators are trying to do the contrary.
In considering the relation of science to the dictators we must bear in mind that the human mind is intrinsically no better than it was 10,000 years ago. It simply has acquired new interests under social tension. In the Middle Ages social tension expressed itself so strongly in religion that there were 110 holy days in the year; a new ecclesiastical architecture was evolved; all Europe rose to the spiritual need of wresting Jerusalem from the "infidel." Today, however, it means more to our society to discover how the atom is constituted than that a new ecclesiastical architecture is developed, more that the mechanism of heredity is revealed than that savages in Africa are converted to Christianity. Perhaps its pragmatic attitude has led science to ignore essential ethical values. But the point is that science dominates our society, and that if our society wants science it must choose between totalitarianism and democracy. There can be no compromise."
"When the business man and the inventor were freed from this aristocratic fetishism, machine after machine appeared, and with the machines came mass production and mass consumption of identical goods. Without standardization mass production is impossible. To have cheap, good clothes we must all dress more or less alike. To bring automobiles within the reach of millions we must have the assembly line. To live inexpensively in cities we must eat packaged foods, dwell in more or less standardized homes, bathe in standardized bath tubs, and draw water and gas from common reservoirs. Mass production has brought it about that the average life in New York is hardly different from the average life in Wichita. The same motion pictures brighten the screen, the same voices and music well out of loud-speakers in every town, identical cans of tomatoes and packages of cereals are to be found on all grocers' shelves, identical electric toasters brown identical slices of bread everywhere, identical refrigerators freeze identical ice cubes in a million kitchens. If gunpowder made all men the same height, in Carlyle's classic phrase, mass production has standardized behavior, pleasures, tastes, comforts, life itself.
Mass production and labor-saving devices have created a social crisis. We cannot have mass production and mechanization without planning. Engineers and their financial backers are planners. Dictators are planners. Whether they know it or not, most corporation executives and engineers are necessary totalitarians in practice. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin clearly have the instincts of engineers. Their states are designed social structures."
"Often enough we hear it said that mechanical invention has outstripped social invention -- that new social forms must be devised if we are to forestall the economic crises that are brought about by what is called the "impact of science" on society. Communism and Fascism are social inventions, intended among other things to solve the economic problems created by technological change under the influence of capitalism. They attempt to answer a question: Are the technical experts and their financial backers to shape the course of society unrestrained, and even to rule nations directly and indirectly, as they did in France, and as they do in part in Great Britain and the United States? The totalitarians say that a capitalistic democratic government cannot control the experts, the inventors, the creators of this evolving mechanical culture. They therefore have decided to take control of thinking, above all scientific thinking, out of which flow the manufacturing processes and the machines which change life.
But science is more than coal-tar dyes and drugs, electric lamps, airplanes, radio, television, relativity and astrophysics. It is an attitude of mind -- what Professor Whitehead has called "the most intimate change in outlook that the human race has yet experienced." If Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin are to rule, that scientific attitude will have to be abandoned when it conflicts with the official social philosophy. But if it is abandoned there can be no Newtons, no Darwins, no Einsteins. Science will be unable to make discoveries which will change the human outlook and, with the outlook, the social order. If the world wants to preserve science as a powerful social force for good the research physicist, chemist and biologist must be permitted to work without intellectual restraint, i.e. to enjoy the fundamental freedom of democracy."
"An essential to this progress has been that the scientist has not demanded that his theory be considered "true." He does not profess to know what the truth is. A theory must work. It is an expedient. When it ceases to work it is thrown overboard or modified. This method of merciless self-examination cannot be followed in a society where the result of each investigation is predetermined for extraneous reasons. Democracy flounders before it arrives at satisfactory solutions of its social problems. But it is better to flounder and progress than to follow the philosophy of a dictator and to remain socially and scientifically static."