But one man in the crowd looks particularly unhappy, the researcher sitting behind the original drone. In the researcher’s mind, the world is a wasteland. Walking on top of concrete blocks with rusted rebar poking through, the researcher sees a future of destruction. The glass skyscrapers are now in shards on the ground. The walls of what used to be the Pentagon, riddled with bullet holes, burned from the heat of explosions, left in a similar condition to that of the Berlin Wall following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The silhouettes of androids and mechs are present in the background, spreading destruction on the once joyous planet.

The joyous planet, with its eight-lane expressways, steel foundries and corporate offices, tar-black runways and giant warehouses, all in ruins. But worst of all, the researcher has no control over any of this. No job. No income. The researcher did not earn anything from this destruction. No, the researcher thought, I will not let this drone uproot the work I had so diligently done! The new Luddites are born.

The researcher fails to realize that the odds are stacked against the movement of AI-Luddites. The researcher fails to realize that the war is already lost. He doesn’t see that in a world driven by “growth and progress,” one can only hope and pray that those in power are thoughtful enough to think about who they are hurting. Alas, behind the smile of the general on that day, behind the smiles of the CEOs of defense corporations, and behind the smiles of technology billionaires, there is no regard for the common man. There is only a vision radically different from that of the researcher—one of greater production, one of greater power, one of greater triumph.

And so, the cycle continues. The Luddites fail to consider anything but an Armageddon of labor. The elites fail to consider anything but growth and power. But this time, they aren’t the only thinkers. The machines can think about everything: the Luddites, and the elites, and they know that it is their time to strike. When the drones turn their guns on the Luddites and the elites, the aliens that come to revisit this tale will shake their heads, wondering why the humans could not see the problems in plain sight, and why the humans could not work together to maintain control over their monopoly of violence. They laugh at the failures of human nature, how a species could be so oblivious to their self-destruction.

Kubrick was wrong. We will not shut down HAL 9000. It seems that in our creation of HAL 9000, we forgot that we could very easily be shown our place. We have shown that we are smart enough to destroy the world. Now we will show that we are stupid enough to do it.