I’m not sure whether I’m on my own but when Microsoft offer me yet another chance to add AI to my computer, I give it a big “delete”. I know that AI drives heaps of things I use but I have a deep suspicion that the mostly rich men who own the companies generating AI wouldn’t have an altruistic motive in their little toe, let alone community ethics.
Think how they have mercilessly stolen IP of writers, authors, song writers, poets, painters, local news media companies. They have absolutely no morality. Just reflect on that group of men who sat behind Trump at his inauguration day. They paid $1m each to be seen to be there. Those people own and drive AI.
I’ve finally read an article about AI which I found understandable. It’s written by Cory Doctorow in the Guardian and it covers what AI is and the dangers it threatens, including to our super funds if we have too much in the area covered by the investment in AI. Pour yourself a cup of tea and read this article.
In another article, Who-Pays-for-the-AI-Bubble_-CounterPunch.org_.pdf we are challenged by a more political analysis of AI the author wrote:
It is not obvious to casual observers what has paid for the emerging AI bubble. Corporate welfare, soft loans, local tax abatements, and outright cash transfers have flooded into the sector, while the robber barons behind today’s platforms get away with grand theft larceny under the euphemism of “economic development.” The money is public, the upside is privatized, and the risks are socialized, as usual. What is remarkable is not that this is happening, but that there is virtually no sustained mainstream coverage of the arrangements that are underwriting the so-called AI boom
and
In reality, what got built was not a broad-based AI economy but a hyper-concentrated infrastructure of data centers and cloud contracts locked up by a very small number of firms. Behind every press release celebrating “AI transformation” was a matrix of land deals, tax holidays, free electricity, and infrastructure upgrades paid for by people who will never own a share of stock in these companies. In other words, the AI boom is not just a technology story; it is a classic story of public money being used to inflate private asset prices.
The article concludes:
If there is a silver lining, it might be this: every bubble, eventually, bursts. When it does, the question will be whether the social anger it releases can be redirected from scapegoats and cultural panics toward the actual architecture of corporate welfare and capital accumulation. The AI bubble is a mirror. It reflects not our technological genius but our political cowardice. Whether that changes depends not on machines, but on us
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