I begin with a question that is rarely asked. How does a war actually stop? There are libraries on how wars begin. There is surprisingly little on how they end.

Research knows two answers at its core. One side wins, or both sides can no longer go on. An MIT analysis covering decades of armed conflict reaches a sober finding: wars usually end through victory or through war weariness. In Northern Ireland and in Bosnia, it was the exhaustion of those involved that finally cleared the way.

I do not want to romanticize this exhaustion. It was a cruel brake. It took hold only when hundreds of thousands were dead, when cities lay in ruins, when a generation was missing. But it had one quality we have underestimated. It required no decision. Nobody had to be wise. The human body set the limit that the human will refused to set.

More rests on this limit than we realize. Every ceasefire in the history books was signed by tired people.

The machine that never tires

This limit is falling right now, and Ukraine is where it can be observed. According to Ukrainian figures, around 95 percent of Russian losses are now caused by drones. Unmanned systems fly, drive and swim. Ukraine reports that it has, for the first time, taken and held ground with autonomous systems alone.

A machine has no fear of the next morning. It writes no letters home. It does not desert, it does not mutiny, it does not grow weary of war. When it fails, the next one rolls off the line. The Pentagon wants to field more than 200,000 AI-enabled attack drones by 2027. Russia, according to its president, built around 1.5 million drones in 2025.

The debate about the consequences usually starts at the wrong end. The familiar worry is that wars begin more easily when none of your own soldiers die. That is probably true. I am concerned with the other side. A war fought by machines loses its natural ending. What does not tire does not stop by itself.

Exhaustion moves house

Even the machine is not entirely without limits. It needs electricity. It needs factories, chips and batteries. So the war of machines does end at some point, namely when one side runs out of energy.

That sounds like reassuring news. It is the opposite. Exhaustion does not disappear, it moves house. It migrates from the soldier to the power plant. But the power plant does not only supply the drone factory. It supplies the hospital, the waterworks, the heating in January.

This, too, is already reality. Ukraine's available generating capacity has fallen from around 38 to 14 gigawatts. In January 2026, people in Kyiv spent on average half of every day without power. A large transformer weighs more than 200 tons. It is built to order, with a lead time of more than two years. Ukraine responds with strikes on Russian refineries and substations.

Anyone who thinks the war of machines through to its end therefore arrives at a bitter sentence. The front no longer runs only between armies. It runs through the power grids of civilians. The decision falls where people are freezing.

The archaic type, upgraded

At this point I have to talk about the human being who wages such wars. I call him the archaic type. This is not an insult. It is a pattern as old as our species. The warrior draws his worth from victory. The tribal human divides the world into us and them. The plunderer takes what he can get. The ruler treats power as personal property.

These types have shaped history. They were survivable all the same, for a plain reason. They ran into limits. Their armies grew tired. Their bodies aged. Their reach ended where horses and supplies ended.

Exactly these limits are now being dismantled on purpose. The American research agency DARPA has worked for years on making soldiers less dependent on sleep. One of its papers states the idea quite openly: if sleep is removed as a performance factor, continuous operations become possible. A current program aims at full performance on three hours of sleep a day.

This is where a path begins that I consider logical. The human moves closer to the machine. First come drugs, then sensors on the body, then implants. At the end stands a being closer to an android than to us. This path has a bright side, which I will come to. Its dark side is quickly named. Whoever takes fatigue away from the archaic type does not improve him. He removes his last brake.

Four forces, two outcomes

What could replace the archaic type? My answer consists of four forces: time, education, prosperity and, of course, technology. Those who no longer fight for survival can develop. Artificial intelligence and robotics promise this relief on a scale that has never existed.

The calculation has a catch, and it can be shown in living people. The archaic type is not a museum piece. He sits at the controls of our time.

Elon Musk was, after the SpaceX IPO, the first person with an estimated fortune of one trillion dollars. According to Reuters reporting, he had Starlink coverage cut over parts of Ukraine in the fall of 2022 while a counteroffensive was under way there. Reconnaissance drones went dark. For Crimea, Musk denies a shutdown. He says he merely declined to extend coverage, out of concern about escalation. For my argument, the undisputed core is enough. One single man decides whether an army can communicate.

Donald Trump ordered by memorandum that the Pentagon's directive on autonomous weapons be revised. Until now it has required appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force. According to a Washington Post report, the delegations of the United States and Russia in Geneva removed the requirement for human review of AI-selected targets from a United Nations draft. Supporters counter that autonomous systems protect their own soldiers and deter opponents.

Vladimir Putin has shaped Russia's politics for a quarter of a century. His conditions for ending the war have, according to the Kremlin, been unchanged since 2024. The war is tied to his rule.

None of these three men lacks time, education, prosperity or technology. They have all four in abundance. And yet their conduct follows the oldest patterns: control over the means of war, power by order, rule through war.

Research offers an explanation. Studies from Berkeley show that compassion declines as people climb the social ladder. So the four forces do not produce a new human by themselves. Concentrated in a few hands, they upgrade the old one. According to Oxfam, the twelve richest billionaires own more than the poorer half of humanity. Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people.

Human 2.0

The same four forces can bring about the opposite. There is evidence for this, and it gives me confidence.

The political scientist Ronald Inglehart had people around the world surveyed over decades. The pattern is clear. Where prosperity and life opportunities grow broadly, values shift. Tolerance increases. Self-expression becomes more important than obedience. The willingness to go to war for one's own country declines. The warrior loses his audience.

This is what I call the beginning of Human 2.0. I mean a new generation of human beings that grows beyond the archaic types. It has time because machines take the drudgery off its hands. It uses that time to realize its intellectual potential. It no longer measures its worth by victory over others.

The term demands a clear line. The twentieth century decreed the new human twice, once from the left and once from the right. Both attempts ended in camps. Human 2.0 can be neither bred nor commanded. He grows where people have freedom, education and security. Nobody can manufacture him. One can only prepare the ground.

The path toward the machine belongs in this picture too, when it heals. The first patient with a Neuralink implant was quadriplegic. He moved a cursor with his thoughts. Technology that gives something back to a person does not contradict Human 2.0. What matters is what is left behind. The android leaves the limit behind. Human 2.0 leaves the archaic drive behind.

The time in between

Between the two developments lies a problem of timing. The tireless machine is here. The new human needs at least a generation. In this time in between, the archaic type already holds the tool in his hand.

On top of that, the change is not secure. More recent analyses of the same surveys show a turn in the trend. The decline in the willingness to fight has slowed. In countries with wars in their neighborhood, it is rising again. Fear wakes the archaic type in all of us.

Technology does not help by itself either. Michael Gerlich of SBS Swiss Business School published a study with 666 participants in 2025. In it, frequent use of AI tools went along with weaker critical thinking. Higher education protected against this. Free time can lead to growth. It can just as easily drain away into a screen. A machine that does our thinking for us does not produce a Human 2.0. It produces a comfortable Human 1.0.

That is my warning. Two clocks are running at once. One measures how fast machines remove the limits of the old type. The other measures how fast a new type grows up. At the moment, the first clock runs faster.

What holds the balance

Whether it stays that way is not a matter of fate. The evidence shows a clear condition. Time, education, prosperity and technology change people only when the broad population has a share in them. Distribution is the fifth force. It decides over the other four.

From this follow tasks that can be named. The gains of automation must reach people as free time, not only as wealth for the owners. Education must stay open for a lifetime, because it protects against dulling. The decision over life and death must remain with humans who answer for it. No single individual may control the means of war of an entire people.

This holds beyond Earth. A humanity that sets out for other worlds takes its type along. A new place does not make a new human.

My confidence has a reason. The archaic type never had to learn to stop, because exhaustion did it for him. Human 2.0 would be the first to stop out of insight. That people are capable of this is shown by the data wherever they are given the chance. The brake of the future is no longer a tired body. It is a human being who has learned that he does not have to win.

| The Planet Futures Organization, the first multiplanetary NGO.

Homepage: https://planet-futures.org