Motion to Reconsider Swarm AI Weapons, in Light of Pope Leo's AI Encyclical

Dear Fayetteville City Council,

Please consider a Motion to Reconsider the Swarm AI Weapons Factory zoning issue in light of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, just released. The Pope’s major teaching was largely about Artificial Intelligence and war, as well as a major church apology for slavery. Regarding AI regulation, Pope Leo’s most central message was: “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.”

The Pope says he is troubled by “increasingly autonomous weapons systems, practically beyond any human reach to govern them effectively.”

While mentioning the slave trade in relation to AI, the Pope warned that the world was in “danger of normalising the exploitation of people again (with) parallels between the historical tragedy of traditional slavery and the emerging threats of “new digital slaveries”….

For example, the Pope condemned the use of AI in warfare, saying that reducing human control of weaponry makes it even harder to consider a war “just” and warned against launching an AI arms race...(and) risks sparking conflict more quickly and rendering it more impersonal by “lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data”.

What the Pope is condemning and warning us about is specifically the kinds of autonomous AI weapons systems poised to be manufactured in Fayetteville by Swarm Aero. Swarm has said a human would still be in control, but a central purpose of using AI for their weapons is so a single soldier can send up a swarm of 100 drones at once, each given autonomous targeting power. It is impossible for one human to control more than one drone; swarming systems, by definition, are outside human control.

The danger of this factory was never simply carbon fiber and chemicals. The bigger danger is that these are AI weapons systems that can act outside human control. These are set to fly out of Drake Field, and there is a distinct possibility that these systems could make an autonomous targeting decision on a Fayetteville residence, business or government building. This kind of danger could happen even without a “payload” bomb, as as kamikazee attack.

Moreover, Swarm says they want to manufacture these dangerous systems at “World War II” levels. This is clearly not light industrial, and should not be zoned as such.

It would be wise to heed the words of Pope Leo. These AI weapons are indeed dangerous not only to Fayetteville, but also to our entire nation and world.

We were also told by various businessmen at the council meeting that we need Swarm for economic reasons, but that thinking is divorced from our national economic health. Ironically, I heard one businessman pound his fist and say this is “not an issue of morality,” but we need to do it for the economy because its “the right thing to do,” which is the very definition of morality. Is it the economically right thing to waste trillions on weapons and war, while everything else that actually helps the people gets slashed, especially for the poor. This is an age old problem, of the richest few wanting war, while the poor suffer from those wars, in manifold ways.

Please heed the words of the great Reverend Dr. King in his famous Beyond Vietnam speech at Riverside Church:

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as (the war) continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

...war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

There has also been much talk about violence after the last council meeting, some of it exaggerated. But let us listen again to Dr. King on violence from that same Riverside Church speech:

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government…(and) the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Every action our hyper-violent national government officials take to extinguish the democratic voice of the people, increases the probability of violence. The vast majority of people would prefer peaceful revolution and for democracy to actually function. We have taken some steps toward democracy, but we have also taken many steps backward, and it is under wholesale assault right now by those in power.

We see the Voting Rights act being attacked, and countless other current assaults on democracy by the current Republican regime. However, independent-minded people have also seen the other corporate war party similarly assault democracy to destroy the campaign of the more socialistic campaign of Bernie Sanders, twice. Democrat Superdelegates are inherently anti-democratic and we witnessed DNC elites pulling all sorts of dirty tricks. We have also seen the Democrat Party repeatedly sue to kick peace candidates and peace parties off the ballot.

We have also seen a 140 year assault on democracy by Big Business, following the creation of “corporate personhood,” which was recently used to defend Swarm under “equal protection.” This legal fiction arises from the 1886 Supreme Court Case of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad, which established that a corporation can be considered a person deserving the same Constitutional rights as a living, breathing human. Corporations exploited the newly created 14^th Amendment created for freed slaves, giving them equal protection under the law. Following its establishment after the Civil War, the vast majority of court cases invoking the 14^th Amendment revolved around granting corporations more rights, not freed slaves.

This created Corporate Rule, deeply undermining democracy and social well being in countless ways. Swarm is just one example, among thousands. The most widely recognized and condemned element of Corporate Personhood is the 2010 Citizens United case. After Santa Clara created corporate personhood, the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision established that money is speech. Citizens United put those two pieces together to establish that a “corporate person” has free speech rights to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.

Citizens United showed Americans the disaster of unlimited corporate campaign spending by the Billionaire Corporate Class. A 2025 YouGov poll showed 79 percent of Americans oppose Citizens United, including 74 percent of Republicans. Most Americans see the corrupting influence of Big Money in elections, where over 90 percent of the time the candidate with more money wins. The 2024 Federal elections broke records, with nearly $16 billion spent, and 20 percent or $3 billion came from just 300 billionaires and their immediate families.

Just 5 years after Citizens United in 2015, 5 million Americans had signed a petition for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to end this disease of Corporate Personhood. Over 840 local governments and 22 states have passed resolutions for a constitutional “We the People” Amendment to end it, currently in Congress as H.J.Res. 54. Around

Personally, I led efforts in 2012, along with others from the Occupy movement, to successfully pass resolutions against Corporate Personhood in Fayetteville and four other Arkansas cities. Even if Swarm and other corporations can legally dominate their will over us, we must openly condemn this injustice, not give support.

These are all elements of what Dr. King and JFK are referencing when they criticize those that are making peaceful revolution impossible. All of these anti-democratic elements push otherwise peaceful people into a corner, just as our empire does to otherwise peaceful people all over the world. We invade and control dozens of nations, and allow the people no real democratic voice, and then we act surprised when they violently resist. It’s essentially a law of nature.

Nationally, millions upon millions of us are very frustrated by the lack of democracy to make peaceful revolution possible. Millions of us are beyond outraged at the bipartisan US-armed genocide of Gaza and our endless bipartisan wars. The problem is not just the hyper-violent killings, but also the trillions of our tax dollars wasted when it could be doing something good for people. It could end poverty and all those bright minds building weapons could be building clean energy to stop climate change from making us extinct.

The Swarm issue brings all this together. It is an element of the hyper-violent government policy of endless warfare. It is the autonomous AI weapons problem the Pope and head of the UN condemn. It is the problem of our brightest UA engineering minds being wasted building death machines instead of clean energy solutions. It is also an economic problem, as it may give a few local jobs, but it is part of a national economic trainwreck, as we waste trillions on war instead of social programs and clean energy solutions. Endless warfare spending is also a principle cause of our nearly $40 trillion national debt, which we now waste over $1 trillion per year just on interest. That is not good economics!

Let us listen again to Dr. King’s Riverside Speech:

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death...

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

We must ask ourselves what image do we want for Fayetteville? Do we want an image of a peaceful and progressive democracy, or do we want an image of violence and militarism? Which image is better for business and citizen well being? Swarm is inherently a violent business, extremely harmful to the image of Fayetteville, and supporting this is supporting violence. Some businesses will not come here with that image, and I know some that may leave.

Please listen to The Pope and Dr. King and Motion to Reconsider the Swarm Aero zoning.

Thank you,

Abel Tomlinson