The American Betrayal Of Humanity
AI is coming for your job, your career; and who invented AI? There is a lot of finger pointing at China but the real enemy is often portrayed as a friend. The American betrayal of humanity is gathering pace and nothing much is halting it. The recent revelations about how Apple funded and trained China are instructional. The piecemeal nature of a neoliberal corporatised world lacks any big picture awareness. Shareholders are the priority for these multinational giants. Greater profitability is the name of the game at whatever cultural cost. Humanity is once again rapidly descending in value for these companies despite being their ultimate reason for existing.
AI Born In The USA
The AI revolution is being marketed as a game changer for humanity. But who is evaluating the score in real terms across the board? American capitalism is a ruthless beast. It has, thanks to recent economic and political trends, become even more so over the last few decades. Greed is good, remember. The stock market is king; and money means everything in American culture. Materialism has sunk religiosity in the land of the free. We are all much more economically literate these days. Donald Trump is the President of the United States for the second time, as if he didn’t get it right the first time. DOGE under Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is sacking government workers left, right and centre. Little respect for their humanity being shown here, is there?
Digitization Betraying Real World Human Beings For Profitability
The digitization of everything is occurring rapidly with people being replaced by machines. All for the economic good of the nation, of the company, and for the bank balances of investors. AI it is estimated by Goldman Sachs to shed some 300 million jobs over the next period. This is the rich driving the bus for their own benefit. Humanity is in the grip of a greed driven curve.
“Artificial intelligence (AI) could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs, a report by investment bank Goldman Sachs says.”
Yes, productivity will be enhanced and the report mentions new jobs being created but is fairly vague about this part of the equation. In all previous industrial revolutions there was enormous disruption to lives and many individuals never recaptured their lifestyles. History, invariably, glosses over those who are collateral damage along the way.
“ “The only thing I am sure of is that there is no way of knowing how many jobs will be replaced by generative AI,” Carl Benedikt Frey, future of-work director at the Oxford Martin School, Oxford University, told BBC News. “
- (Chris Vallance, BBC, March 2023)
The PR wings of the AI companies are not going to paint anything but a rosy picture, are they? The corporate bean counters are likewise rubbing their hands together at the projected savings in labour costs to the bottom line. The reality is, however, human beings losing their jobs and left with an uncertain future. American CEOs and their corporations are used to behaving ruthlessly when it comes to shedding jobs in the thousands. Oligarchs, like Musk and Bezos, have long left their humanity behind to rocket into the heavens, where gods traditionally reside.
Who Will Buy The AI Produced Goods?
The American betrayal of humanity is couched in economic terms. The increased productivity will be good for the country. Who is going to buy the AI produced goods and services if so many of us have lost our jobs and careers? Shareholders are rubbing their hands together in glee at greater returns and dividends. The supply side economics will be greatly enhanced but what about a demand stripped of income? You can see human beings are becoming obsolete, cant you? AI may eventually decide to scrap the whole thing, as being largely unproductive.
The Devaluation Of Humanity
What is really happening here is the devaluation of humanity. “AI does it so much better! AI will save humanity?’ Now, a lot of the AI hype is marketing spin. However, we have handed over control to the money men and they can only see things in terms of ROI. The shrinkage of government has put the short term views of private companies like Apple, Amazon, Meta, Starlink and Nvidia in charge of where we are heading. They are, simultaneously, de-peopling the supply chains and business sectors. It is a perfect storm of stripping humanity from the centre of things. Most of us will be disenfranchised and moved out to the fringes of the power dynamic. Trump and his oligarchic backers are accelerating this process right now. They are attacking any competing power centres like the universities and large legal firms. The Trump regime is dismantling government agencies and sacking thousands of civil servants. All under the cover of greater efficiencies and bogus claims about antisemitism on campus. Where has the great American belief in free speech gone under this repressive regime?
Who Controls Your Life?
If we continue to put our trust in money men and the corporate realm we will see our lives blighted beyond repair. Our children are being born into a form of digital slavery. Screens are everywhere and human beings stare into them for most of the day. The digital world, which is a poor copy of the real thing, has taken over our lives. Don’t believe me? Take an honest look around your life and what you do every day. Where is all the power? What device rules your life? Who controls the apps and platforms you use? Who makes the devices? Look at the stock market and see where the wealth is and in what sector? Big Tech! These oligarchs all lined up behind Donald Trump because the previous administration started attempts to break them up via anti-trust laws. Trump is tearing down some of these investigations and laws.
“From winning a significant antitrust case against Google to adding additional export controls against China, the Biden administration took significant steps toward technology regulation in the U.S.
The incoming Trump administration will likely depart from some of Biden’s initiatives, including heightened merger scrutiny, Kovacic said. Still, he noted that other initiatives, including the online search and digital advertising technologies antitrust cases against Google, will continue under Trump.”
Trump will bully and grift some payout from these super wealthy players in the Big Tech sector.
Digital Slaves Under Machines
The thing is that if we all continue to somnolently drift along in our lives the future is not bright. Our kids will suffer under this machine favoured oligarchy, becoming second class citizens and digital slaves. All the important decisions will be made by AI. Our input is already being undermined and curtailed in big companies globally. The capitalist framework of stocks and shares being the economic imperative driving our lives will see us driven off the side of a cliff to our destruction. It is crazy, but the technological frenzy is doing just that and leadership is very thin on the ground to arrest this. Putting businessmen in positions of power in government is only accelerating this coming annihilation.
The Cost Of AI
For every potentially wonderful thing that you hear about AI there will be a hundred banally demeaning consequences of which you will probably not hear but may suffer. ‘Cancer beating medical marvel thanks to AI’ However, you will likely not be able to afford this wonder drug because you and people like you would have lost their well paying careers and been forced to work at some shit job to pay the rent instead. It is the extreme ruthlessness of capitalism and its corporate world which will ensure the American betrayal of humanity. Who will look out for your interests? It wont be Trump or Musk or Bezos. All these oligarchs and authoritarianists are lining up to replace you with a machine that will quietly do its job. Technology is in the hands of dictators and technolords to do their bidding. I very much doubt that AI will raise moral objections to plans to streamline the workforce and, therefore, increase productivity. The LLM settings, I find from things like Chat GPT are fairly nondescript about such stuff. I predict that authoritarian regimes will have their AI customized to avoid pesky questions about morality coming up for the subjected citizenry 1984 style. It will be like the South’s efforts not to allow Black slaves to learn to read, making it a criminal offence at the time. Controlling the information technology will be the next step under Trump and his oligarchs, I surmise. Forcing Apple to make iPhones in the US could be a means to this end. A slight majority of 1.4 points of American voters elected Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. I found this hard to believe, at the time, and I still do. Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.
Social Media Is An American Invention
On this basis, America is the enemy. The American tech sector, in particular, is a betrayer of humanity. Social media is one of the worst things ever to have happened to us. This convoluted framework for digital communication and record keeping has been a bane for us ever since its introduction a couple of decades ago.
“MySpace was the first social media site to reach a million monthly active users – it achieved this milestone around 2004. This is arguably the beginning of social media as we know it.1
Some large social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit, have been around for ten or more years, but others are much newer.
TikTok, for example, launched in September 2016, and by mid-2018, it had already reached half a billion users. To put this in perspective: TikTok gained, on average, about 20 million new users per month over this period.”
Social media is akin to sugar, in my view, it initially tastes great but does real damage to your health and wellbeing over time. Sugar, of course, was long defined by slavery via the plantation labour that worked it. Many millions of Indigenous people died as a direct result of the sugar industry. Social media enslaves us and our young in particular. It gives a view of our lives through a strange lens warped by the algorithms underpinning the platforms. Both sugar and social media are destructive things when used in excess and both are highly addictive. Weakened governments bought off by Big Tech are in thrall to social media and have been ineffective in regulating it, especially in the US. Influencers are corralled at election campaign times to do their bidding and quid pro quo results.
The Ubiquity Of Digital Technology
The thing about digital technology, in its modern sense, is that it has made its way into most homes around the planet. It is this level of infection or ubiquity, which makes it so dangerous to us all and the planet. Never before in history has one such thing permeated so effectively the lives of the entire human population. It means that bad stuff can reach everywhere, pretty much, very quickly. Yes, the converse of that could be true but little good has been travelling down those pipelines and fibre optic cables of late. It is the unthinking acceptance of technological innovations on the back of the free market economy which is most troubling. This naïve neoliberal idea that the market will be the best judge of everything based on its commerciality is threatening the survival of humanity. The market is not carefully attuned to what is in the better interest of humanity. It is driven by short term sugar hits that satisfy youthful preoccupations like fashion and entertainment. If it looks cool and does cool stuff!
Ignorance & The Fraudulent Nature Of The Digital Realm
Lots of folk are completely unaware of how digital technology and computers work. This makes them vulnerable to scammers and manipulation by those in power. Many users of social media are unaware that they are probably communicating with machines, bots, rather than other human beings. The online social forums that they use are, often, populated by non-human entities. If you do not know how stuff works you are vulnerable on this basis. Nearly everyone has a smart phone but the majority of us are largely ignorant to the workings of the Internet and the digital space. This makes whole populations easy to influence via platforms like social media. Indeed, quite a few people get drunk and go on social media spilling out their hearts and are taken advantage of by scammers and nefarious agents of influence. This is happening every minute of every day to lots of folk.
Power Remains In Few Hands
We live at a time, when it is possible to know lots of stuff. We have access to the widest plethora of information ever known. However, power remains sequestered in the hands of very few and this is tightening and shrinking every day. Knowing lots of stuff is not enough if you are unable to affect what we are doing and where we are heading collectively. Democracy has been shown to be a shell game in the US, bought off by vested interests many decades ago. Extreme greed drives too many Americans. Lauding the individual over community continually damages the country. The wealth divide between haves and have nots is obscene in America.
“Another indicator of wealth concentration: the richest 1 percent own 50 percent of U.S. stock and mutual funds, up from 40 percent in 2002, according to Federal Reserve data.
Inequality is skyrocketing even within the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest. As of May 2023, the net worth of the richest member of this group was 38 times larger than the net worth of the richest member in 1982 (in today’s dollars). Since 1982, just eight men have held this spot: shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig (1982), oil executive Gordon Getty (1983-1984), Walmart founder Sam Walton (1985-1988), media company owner John Kluge (1989-1991), Microsoft founder Bill Gates (1992-2017, except 1993), investor Warren Buffett (1993), Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (2018-2021), and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (2022).”
The tax rate for the richest folk in America used to be around 90% just after WW2 and that has been lowered over successive administrations to around 30-40% now. What does that tell you about the US and its political leaders? The power elite has been under the aegis of the wealthy for much of its history. The rest of the country has been treated like schmucks. The working poor have been diddled for so long they don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. The culture wars have been a strategic distraction designed to hook voters into emotive issues like gender, guns, immigration, and race whilst they are being fleeced by wealthy interests who have already bought the political contestants. Every level of government and the supreme court in the US have been bought by light and dark money. Super PACS.
The American betrayal of humanity is a wake up call but will any of us listen and do something about it in time before it’s too late? Too busy looking at your phone? We have all been sidelined for so long and directed to online recreational entertainment that few of us are likely capable of recognising and acting on the threat. Perhaps, I am wrong about this troubling proclivity toward apathy? We will have to see.
“Individualism allows for this kind of stuff to go on because people are primarily concerned with their own realities rather than the community. If there are no strong communities with broad ties to all their members it is easy to isolate individuals and pick them off one by one. Oh the bad things are not happening to me or mine! It is happening to someone else. The Trump regime will put out lies saying that all these targeted individuals are bad people, violent gangsters and such like. No real proof is ever provided to the public just blanket statements. These kinds of thing happened in Hitler’s Germany and in Chile in the latter part of the 20C. Removing political opponents and unwanted voices of dissent.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©HouseTherapy
