KYIV -- Fourteen years ago, science fiction writer Daniel Suarez described swarms of autonomous killer drones attacking humans in his novel Kill Decision On the battlefields of Ukraine, drone technology has taken a leap forward, bringing his dark imaginings of such warfare closer to reality.

In an interview with Nikkei Asia, Suarez warned that political leaders -- armed with artificial intelligence powered surveillance and robotic weapons -- could one day come to believe that they no longer need democracy.

From autonomous weapons to AI-driven social control and genetic engineering, Suarez's novels explore a fundamental question: How will technological innovation reshape society? He does not oppose tech-backed progress but asks how it can serve humanity without undermining liberal democracy.

As the U.S. and China race to develop AI, the question grows more urgent. What happens when the technological advances give a small number of powerful people the means to monitor populations, deploy lethal robots and govern without accountability? What future does Suarez envision? Edited excerpts from the interview: Daniel Suarez described swarms of autonomous killer drones attacking humans in his novel published in 2012.

The threat posed by autonomous killer drones is becoming a reality on the battlefields of Ukraine Is the emergence of such weapons inevitable?

I felt positive that drones were going to become a revolution in military affairs. What I wanted to avoid, particularly for democracies, was a situation where we had to react to a crisis at the last moment without having thought through the potential consequences in advance.

Certainly, first-person-view drones have revolutionized warfare at the front line. With a few hundred dollars of 3D-printed components and transistors, people can put together a drone that can bring three to four kilograms of explosives to bear and blow up a multimillion-dollar tank.

There's the threat we face physically as free nations. How does representative government respond to this imminent threat? And, of course, it's an asymmetric threat because attribution is difficult. At what point are we at war with somebody? And if so, with whom?

But how we react to that threat also threatens our way of life, whether that's representative government, the rule of law or the ethics and norms of warfare. If autonomous weaponry is inevitable, we should use the time we have to come to terms with how we build in systems of control and transparency to try to retain the rule of law. I'm still convinced there is a way to keep a chain of responsibility where people can be answerable for what machines do.

Even if we impose restrictions on ourselves, what if authoritarian states like Russia or China develop and deploy autonomous lethal weapons without any restraints?

A lot of proponents of these systems say the enemy will be doing it faster. Their decision-making loop is going to be much faster than ours. But what are the consequences of imitating them? Don't we also become an authoritarian system? What is to stop a Putin or a Trump from unaccountable power, simply taking a vast army of robotic weapons and saying: "We don't need democracy anymore"?

As inevitable as autonomy is, I don't think we should have complete lethal autonomy. There should always be a human in the kill decision, in the loop. We should focus on systems that allow us to process that decision-making rapidly. We still have responsibilities, even though dictatorships and criminals don't. We are not in a competition with criminals to see how many people can be killed.

We have an extra burden as free nations and nations that have the rule of law: to preserve our way of life at the same time that we're fighting these people. One advantage that free people have over authoritarian systems is information moving freely through that system. I think we can innovate and adapt, and that's going to be our superpower in response to this.

Many technological advances you envisioned in your earlier works are becoming reality. Which developments have gone beyond your imagination, and what concerns you most?

A lot of people seem to be perfectly willing to turn over their decision-making to large language models, and of course we've seen how LLMs can hallucinate. For mission-critical applications, whether it's medical or military, or even just navigating a vehicle through traffic, the willingness to turn that over and get people out of the decision-making process is concerning.

We've also seen here in the United States the building of data centers and the funding of AI beyond what seems to be any sustainable level. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars a year in compute, data centers and chips. The frenzy seems to be tied to some existential concern: we need to beat China in AI, or we need autonomous weapons to defend ourselves.

I am very concerned -- what does that race entail? Is it our desire to make an even bigger and better surveillance state than they have? If we should have a goal, it should be: How do we preserve human agency -- how do we preserve democracy? Not just for ourselves, but for a thousand generations to follow us. This is a very key crossroad.

The internet has made it easier to create and disseminate information, but also disinformation. Is AI strengthening democracy or undermining it?

People are able to spread misinformation and, as it's called, "flood the zone" with falsehoods, making it almost impossible to determine what is true and what is false. What we have seen is that those who have a great deal of compute have a great deal of power, and largely, it's unaccountable power. If somebody is able to marshal a whole bunch of bots, they can swamp the web, the internet, chat rooms and social media to create a false consensus.

This can really poison the well for democratic governance, because it's difficult to determine what the popular will is. AI has automated the problem. A lie will go halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on. I think this problem has been industrialized with LLMs.

Do you really want your worst idea of a leader, whether it's Trump or somebody else, to have a robot army and complete surveillance 24/7, driven not by humans sitting in front of a monitor, but by AIs that watch literally everything all the time?

Daniel Suarez warns not only of a political leader with a robot army and complete surveillance, but also of corporations wielding outsized influence and control.

MSites I would prefer that a lot of that brain power be put toward preserving our freedoms, the rule of law, accountability and transparency, rather than trying to develop just another LLM. Otherwise, we really are headed toward a centrally controlled and very unaccountable society. If some very rich and powerful people, whom we can't keep track of, have all of these machines, data centers and cameras at their disposal, that is an existential threat.

You have warned of a world dominated by billionaires and tech moguls. With figures like Elon Musk today, how much has that world become a reality?

Corporations that provide services to governments have outsized influence and control. Sovereign governments can become almost junior partners when they're employing new systems. We have pervasive systems, whether they are for the internet, for social media, for surveillance, for defense. They are almost a monoculture.

We are starting to see the stirrings about it here in the United States during this midterm. People try to take back some reasonable voice, and I think this isn't just a left-right issue. It's very much a human, average-citizen issue versus immensely powerful people. Authoritarianism is on the march again.

Innovation seems to be accelerating faster than society can adapt. Can we ensure that it serves humanity? And do we still have the power to shape our future?

I feel that it's not just laws that can do that. It's going to require that people not be so complacent. Whenever I start to feel really down about technology and its capability to dominate people, I go to a conference like DEF CON and see tens of thousands of people, many of them young, doing amazing things with technology to understand and defeat technologies that might control them.

Every system that is built, particularly these monocultural systems, has susceptibility. If you have people who know how technology works and have the motivation and community, I think that can overpower the forces that might try to dominate. Technology can also connect people and help them organize.

Change seems to be accelerating, and a lot of it revolves around AI, compute, who has access to it and how transparent it is. We eventually come upon some balance between over-regulation and under-regulation. But it's that struggle -- that conversation -- that is the very idea, the fabric of democracy. Eiji Furukawa is a contributing writer.