The birth of ‘gunpowder warfare’ can be traced back to the 15th century and the invention of the matchlock gun, the first mechanical firing device. Now drone swarms attack across borders with impunity. In 1685, Giovanni Borelli, the Italian physicist, foresaw a world where machines driven by pulleys could ape the actions of animals. Elon Musk now talks of robots intelligent enough to do the shopping and take the place of surgeons.
Technologicaldevelopment is both immediateandanchored inhistory, both Everything, Everywhere All at Once and Slow Horses. The fast/slow contrast is embedded in the artwork, Calculating Empires, a 24-meter-long mural, on display at the Design Museum in Barcelona. It visualizes the journey from the printing press to deep fakes, from quipu, an ancient Peruvian calculator made of knotted ropes, to ‘planetary scale’ data systems.
“What I find really interesting is,when people go into this installation, it helps you put this moment in perspective,”Kate Crawford told the Mobile World Congress inBarcelona in March. Crawford,artificial intelligence research professoratthe University of Southern California, is the co-creator of the mural,which took four years tofabricate.With the visual artist,VladenJoler,the work urges us all toconsiderwho ismaking the rulesanddeciding what matterswhen it comes to fundamental technology shifts.
“Peoplefeellike we’re living in this technological presentism and crazy amount of change,”Crawford said. “So,the ability to step back andsay,‘what have we learned over 500 years?’[matters].For me,[the mural]was a transformative project, because what wasvery clearis that history is not just about technical innovation.It’sabout who hasthepower to set the rules that we will be living within.”
“This is why agentic AI is so important rightnow, becauseit’sarapidly evolving field. The standards are not yet set, and it’s going to be people here, in rooms like this, at places likeMobileWorld Congress, who are going to have these conversations—what do we want those standards to look like, how do we implement them in our systems, and how do we protect ourselves and our clients?”
“Because this is the big moment to actually make sure that this is a technology that is profoundly useful and helpful and not one that opens up vulnerabilities and attack vectors and new attacksurfaces andactually could be cognitivelyreally quite dangerous as well.”
Read more: The world’s largest tech gathering is talking about ‘accountability laundering’: Here’s why we should christen them Words of the Year
Mobile World Congress is a phenomenon. More than 100,000 delegates walk purposefully around eight cavernous halls, each packed with the technology of the future.Huge pavilionssponsored byHuaweiand Google, Honor and Qualcomm, display remarkable new products linking our car to our phone, a robot to adisabled person,ourglasses to theinternet.Governments keen forinfluence andinvestment jostle for space with the companies that are hoping to win big inthe artificial intelligence revolution.
MWC is also a place for debate.On large stages, the leading minds in the technology worldhave the conversationsoften lost among the flashing neon lightsand interactive plasma screens.“Move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerbergsaidin 2012.Today,the stakes are too high.
We are in a live discussion aboutthe very meaning of intelligence.Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, has said artificial general intelligencecould be with us in as little as five years. In that world, who, or what,willmakedecisions? Is ita question ofhuman in the loop? Oris ithuman in the lead?Or no human neededat all?Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer at Google,has spokenof the risks of “short-term dystopia”as governments, civil society,and regulators struggle tocontrol the effectsofmachines thatcanlearnand decide.
“What do we mean by intelligence?” Crawford asked.“The history of the term‘intelligence’isa troubled one. It’s been used to divide populations, to drive programsabout who is valuable and who is not.”
“We’re trying to compare agents to human intelligence.They’re actually completely different. This[intelligence]is statistical probability at scale. These are systems that are following tasks in complex environments. This is very different to humans, but that means we need to have a different set of questions, which is:what are agents doing? How can we track that, and how can we better understand the way it’s going to change our own workflows and,much more importantly, how we live?”
“The history of the term ‘intelligence’ is a troubled one…”
Artificial intelligence research professoratthe University of Southern California, Kate Crawford
As the debate continues aboutthe tensions between OpenAI, Anthropicand the Department for War in America, Crawford asks what are the red lines for agentuse?“Imagine agents in the battlefield,” she says.Wedonot need to.AI-enabled bombing‘at the speed of thought’has beenreported to be happening in Iran.One of AI’sfunctions is‘decision compression’,shorteningtime framesbetween idea and execution.The‘kill chain’is reducing.
“You’ve got scale and you’ve got speed, you’re [carrying out the] assassination-style strikes at the same time as you’re decapitating the regime’s ability to respond with all the aerial ballistic missiles,”academic Craig Jonesat Newcastle UniversitytoldThe Guardiannewspaperin the U.K.“That might have taken days or weeks in historic wars. [Now]you’redoing everything at once.”
Crawford talks ofaccountability forensics—systems which tracewhere decisions are made.At the moment,we are suffering fromaccountability laundering, where no one takes responsibility. In the U.K. civil service—the operational arm of the government—itisknown as‘sloping shoulders syndrome’,where everyone dodges and weavesto avoid responsibility.
“We are seeinga type of shell game where [people say]‘is it the designer[who is responsible]? Is it thedeployer? Is it theenterpriseclient? Is it the end user?’And everyone can say,‘well, we don’t really know yet’.That’s not going to be acceptable,” said Crawford. I think what we’re going to start to see in the conversation, particularly with regulators,isa very strong chain of accountability so you know exactly who is responsible when.”
If half of whatwastalked about at MWC2026comes true, agents willsoonbeinvolved in everyaspect of our lives. They will be able to read andcacheevery half-writtentext, every deleted image, every email that was left in draft, every video recorded ondigitally enabled glasses, every conversation recorded.Crawford warnedthat this “upends privacy as we have known it”.
“We’re at the very beginning of understanding what that looks like,” she said.All the conversationswill need tobeof substance. And immediate.
This article appears in the April/May 2026: Europe issue of Fortune.
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