Ape++

The mirror

We like to say that leaders fail their nations. It is a comforting sentence, because it locates the failure somewhere outside of us. A bad man rose, he deceived the people, and the people, once they wake up, will be good again.

I no longer believe this. A leader is not an accident that happens to a country. He is a mirror it holds up to itself. Whoever stands at the top of a society was selected by that society, tolerated by it, cheered by it, and kept there by millions of small decisions made by ordinary people. When the face in the mirror is ugly, smashing the glass does not change the face.

That is why I find it hard to blame any single figure for what the USA has become. The United States was supposed to be the exception: the nation built on an argument rather than a bloodline, the place where reason, law and opportunity would finally prove that human beings can govern themselves well. If that experiment now produces the same appetites for spectacle, resentment and tribal certainty as every empire before it, the problem is not the man at the podium. The problem is the raw material. The problem is us.

And once you accept that, history stops being surprising.

The ledger

I used to read about the First World War and ask how it was possible. Roughly twenty million people dead, soldiers and civilians, in a war that almost nobody could explain even while it was being fought. Young men were sent in waves across mud into machine guns, month after month, by generals who knew exactly what would happen. A whole generation of Europe's young men was fed into a grinder over a tangle of alliances and wounded pride.

Then, barely twenty years later, the same continent did it again, only better engineered. The Second World War killed somewhere between seventy and eighty-five million people, about three percent of everyone alive on Earth. Cities were erased from the air. Hunger was used as a weapon on purpose.

And inside that war sat the Holocaust: six million Jews murdered, two out of every three Jews in Europe, alongside millions of Roma, disabled people, prisoners and others. What makes it unbearable is not only the number. It is the method. Timetables, paperwork, procurement, chemistry, logistics. The most educated nation in Europe, the country of Bach and Goethe and Planck, applied its full administrative intelligence to the industrial killing of children. Clerks stamped forms. Engineers optimized furnaces. Neighbours looked away.

For a long time I treated these as aberrations, the century's fever dream. I now read them as data. They are what our species does when the conditions line up, and the conditions line up far more often than we like to admit.

Famine by spreadsheet

If the world wars were humanity at its most violent, the Great Leap Forward was humanity at its most absurd. Between 1958 and 1962, China tried to vault into industrial modernity by decree. Peasants were herded into communes, farm tools were melted down in backyard furnaces to produce useless pig iron, and pseudo-scientific farming theories were imposed on fields that had fed families for centuries.

No one was allowed to say the obvious. Local officials, terrified of looking disloyal, reported harvests that did not exist. The state then requisitioned grain against those invented numbers, sometimes exporting it, while the villages that grew it starved. Those who spoke up were purged. Estimates of the dead range from about fifteen million at the low end to forty-five million or more; many historians settle somewhere above thirty million. It is very likely the largest famine in recorded history, and it was man-made.

There was no war. No enemy army. No drought that could not have been survived. Tens of millions of people died because a system rewarded lying upward and punished truth, and because almost everyone inside it chose survival over honesty. That is not a story about one country or one ideology. It is a story about how human beings behave inside a hierarchy that has stopped listening.

The same story, now with drones

We told ourselves that the twentieth century was a lesson learned. Then, in February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the culmination of a pattern that ran through Georgia in 2008 and the seizure of Crimea in 2014.

More than four and a half years later, the war has become a grinding contest of attrition along a front of roughly a thousand kilometres. By mid-2026, analysts at CSIS estimated about two million total casualties on both sides combined, counting killed, wounded and missing.

Russia alone was estimated to have lost around 450,000 lives, a figure some Western officials have since put closer to half a million. Ukraine's military dead are estimated at 125,000 to 150,000. The UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths and stresses that the real number is higher. Add it up and the dead alone run well past half a million people.

Behind the numbers are the things we said would never happen again in Europe: towns like Bucha, apartment blocks hit by missiles at night, Ukrainian children taken across the border to be raised as Russians. And on the other side, hundreds of thousands of young Russian men, many recruited from poor regions with cash bonuses, sent forward in waves that a First World War general would recognize.

The weapons are new. Drones hunt individual soldiers; satellites watch every trench. The psychology is ancient. One man's ambition, a population that goes along with it, and a world that watches, condemns, and adapts. We have satellites and smartphones and machine learning, and we still settle the question of where a border lies by killing young men until one side runs out.

Ape++

An engineer learns to distrust any system that fails the same way repeatedly. One crash is a bug. The same crash every few decades, across every culture, language, religion and economic system, is the architecture.

Here is the architecture as I now understand it. We are primates who evolved in small bands of a hundred or so, wired for status, loyalty to the in-group and suspicion of the out-group. Then, in an evolutionary eyeblink, we bolted on language, abstraction, writing, mathematics, and eventually nuclear physics and gene editing. We did not replace the ape. We extended it. Ape++, in programmer's shorthand: the same ape underneath, with a much larger set of abilities on top.

The extensions are real, and they are magnificent. The same species that built Auschwitz also wrote the song Comfortably Numb, proved Fermat's Last Theorem and eradicated smallpox. But every one of those abilities still runs on the old wiring. Our intelligence does not govern our tribalism; far too often it serves it. Propaganda is language in service of the band. Bureaucracy is organization in service of the band. A guided missile is physics in service of the band.

This is why WWI, WWII, the Holocaust and the Great Leap Forward no longer surprise me. Surprise requires an expectation that was violated. Once you model humans correctly, as clever apes rather than fallen angels, these events are not violations. They are the expected output when you give a tribal primate industrial-scale tools and a reason to be afraid.

A second planet for whom?

Elon Musk has spent two decades arguing that humanity must become multi-planetary, and he has talked about a self-sustaining city of a million people on Mars. The logic is insurance: put a backup copy of civilization somewhere else, so that one asteroid, one war or one pandemic cannot end the story.

As engineering, I admire it. As philosophy, it skips a question. Insurance protects something worth protecting. What exactly are we backing up?

If we send Ape++ to Mars, we send the whole package. The status games, the tribes, the willingness to starve a village to make the numbers look good, the capacity to stamp the forms and look away. A sealed colony on a hostile planet, where every breath depends on a central authority controlling the oxygen, is not an escape from those tendencies. It is the most perfect environment for them ever devised. Within a few generations there would be factions, then a dominant faction, then a Martian version of every story told above.

So the question is not whether we can populate Mars. It is whether we are the right thing to populate it with. A copy of us is not a fresh start. It is a backup that includes the bug.

Is there a better "us" than us? Perhaps. A version of humanity that kept the curiosity, the mathematics and the music, but lost the reflex to divide the world into our band and theirs. The most important question of the century is whether that version can be educated into existence, designed into our institutions, or built from scratch. And for the first time, building it from scratch no longer sounds like science fiction.

Rooting for the overlords

Which brings me to the uncomfortable thought I keep returning to. Given this record, is it so strange to imagine that some of us will soon be quietly rooting for our AI successors?

The fear of machine overlords assumes the machines would be worse than we are. Look at the ledger and ask honestly: worse by what measure? A system that does not crave status, does not hate the neighbouring tribe, does not need to lie upward to keep its job, and cannot be stirred into a frenzy by a speech. It is not obvious that such a thing would run the world more cruelly than the clever apes have.

But the honest engineer has to finish the thought. These systems are trained on us. Every page of propaganda, every rationalization, every clerk's justification is in the training data. If we build our successors carelessly, we will not get a better us. We will get Ape++ again, running faster, with fewer limits.

So perhaps the real question is not whether we should hand over the keys. It is whether, as we build minds that might be better than ours, we can finally write down what "better" means, explicitly and without flattery. And whether we can hold ourselves to that standard before we ask any machine to.

If we can do that, maybe we would deserve Mars after all. If we cannot, the planet we should worry about is this one.