A Letter on Invisible Machines and the Commerce of the Sky

From my quarters near the Champ de Mars, I write these lines with a trembling hand — not from cold, for the autumn in Paris has been mild, but from a peculiar astonishment that has seized me since a most extraordinary rumour reached my table. A dispatch, purportedly from the year 2026, speaks of a venture called Sierra, scarcely three years old, seeking a valuation of fifteen thousand million dollars to build what they term artificial agents of intelligence — machines that converse with clients on behalf of great commercial houses, requiring no human voice, no human soul behind the words. Fifteen thousand million dollars. I confess I read the figure several times, believing it a misprint. The entire fortune I inherited from my dear father's coffee estates in Minas Gerais, which seemed to me sufficient to fund a lifetime of aeronautical research, would vanish like a droplet in that ocean of capital. Tiger Global, Google Ventures — names that mean nothing to me, yet they suggest a world in which money itself has learned to fly faster than any balloon or aeroplane. What strikes me most deeply, however, is not the sum but the purpose. These investors do not seek to liberate mankind from the earth, nor to unite distant peoples across the sky. They seek to replace the human exchange — the greeting, the complaint, the resolution offered with courtesy and feeling — with a mechanical intelligence. I wonder: does this machine know melancholy? Does it recall, as I do, the red soil of Cabangu, the mist settling over the hills of my childhood? Can it sense that a client's anger is truly loneliness, that a question about a bill is sometimes a plea to be heard? I do not condemn what I cannot understand. When I lifted the 14-bis from the ground at Bagatelle, many declared it impossible, and I learned then that the future is impolite — it arrives without asking permission. But I confess a familiar dread. I built my aeroplane so that the sky might belong to everyone, a territory without frontiers, a commons of wind and light. Already I hear whispers in the salons of Paris that armies will want my invention. Now I learn that, a century hence, even the act of speaking one person to another may be enclosed and sold. Let me say plainly: I refuse frontiers. I refuse them in the air, and I refuse them in the human voice. If the future must build its mechanical servants, let it also remember that the sky — and the word — were meant to be free.