Our first ten proposals

This week was mostly writing, not organising, and I’d like to show you what came out of it.

The first ten proposals of Human Resistance are now online. I spent the past few weeks drafting them, rewriting them and arguing with myself about them. They all start from the same worry. AI is piling up power and money faster than anything we’ve seen, and if nobody organises, the people building it get to keep both. So the proposals fall into two groups: what we’re owed (our share) and who gets to decide (our say).

Our share

The Terminator Tax. Any group making more than €750 million a year pays 10% of its AI and robotics revenue. The money pays for public services and for retraining people whose jobs get automated. It also pays the writers, artists and researchers whose work was used to train these systems without anyone asking them. A tax on extreme wealth. Billionaires - tech, but not only - pay at least 2% of their fortune each year. Income from capital gets taxed like a salary, and nobody gets to own a country’s media. Public digital infrastructure. Break up the monopolies on cloud, computing power and data, and build public and cooperative alternatives. Public services that grow as AI’s profits grow. Free education, healthcare and childcare, and paternity leave as long as maternity leave. Wherever rent eats half a salary, housing comes first. Polluters pay for the transition. A new data centre gets a permit only if it brings its own clean power, stays within strict water limits and shares its revenue with the town that hosts it. Our say

The Power to Stop. The most powerful models need democratic approval before release, plus an off switch tested by someone independent. If a company skips either, its executives answer for it personally. The right to a human decision. If an algorithm decides on your job, your loan, your benefits or your treatment, you can take it to a human who answers for the decision. And no machine decides who to kill in a war. An end to mass surveillance. No live facial recognition in our streets, no social scoring, no tracking us for political ads, and no back doors in encryption. Free from empires. International law binds friends as well as enemies. Governments whose leaders face an ICC arrest warrant get no more weapons, trade, support. Global democracy to govern AI. The long-term goal is a union of democracies with a parliament we elect directly. Until then, AI rules get made at the UN, and every country that isn’t the US or China pools its computing power so it can stop renting someone else’s. The full text is at humanresistance.co/manifesto.

Some of these will seem obvious to you, and a couple will probably make you raise an eyebrow. Either way, tell me. Just hit reply: which one would you fight hardest for, which one would you drop or rewrite, and what did I miss? I read every answer, and the next version will be shaped by them.

This week also gave us a preview of what these proposals are for.

On Tuesday, one Google Cloud data centre near London lost power. Within hours Revolut was down for millions of people across Europe and beyond, and several other UK banks went down with it. It wasn't even a cyberattack and people still couldn’t pay for their groceries. (Bloomberg)

The next day, governments in Europe, Canada and Australia began pulling their own websites offline. AI tools had found two flaws in PHP, the programming language that runs most of the web. Both had been there for more than ten years without anyone noticing. Security researchers ranked them among the worst ever found in software. OpenAI says its AI got there before the attackers did, and next time it might not. (CNBC)

Put the two stories side by side. Our money, our public services and our ability to talk to each other all run on a few concentrated systems. Meanwhile AI can now find weak spots that thousands of human experts missed for years, and it will do that for whoever is holding it. An AI-led attack wouldn’t need a power cut, it would go straight for the weak spot in whatever everything else depends on, and it would move faster than any team of defenders. That’s why public infrastructure and the Power to Stop are the first things we’re asking for, not abstract ideas. Governments need to take control of this technology now, and the switch has to end up in citizens’ hands.

The proposals aren’t going to stay on a website. In the coming weeks we’ll launch our first campaign around one of them, and you’ll hear about it here first. We may also have our first candidate soon, in Rome’s local elections. Nothing is settled yet, but I’ll admit it’s exciting to think of these ideas on an actual ballot.

And tomorrow our team in Marrakech hosts a big gathering (see below), the first we’ve organised outside Europe. More are coming across Europe in the next few weeks. If you’d like one where you live, reply and we’ll build it with you.

Join us!

Andrea, Colombe and Yassine

Human Resistance