Editorial
The Gist
- Power consolidation. AI is a tool that centralizes power and wealth, enabling elite control over society and decision-making processes, particularly in healthcare and justice.
- Environmental illusions. Big Tech uses AI to create narratives that mask environmental harm, promoting misleading stories about its positive impacts while contributing to ecological damage.
- Ethical void. The development of AI reflects a moral and ethical emptiness, prioritizing profit and speed over truth, leading to a cycle of misinformation in advertising and politics.
AI is a master of “bureaucratic cruelties, scaling administrative violence in ways that intensify structures of inequality, such as when AI is used to aid decisions about which patients are prioritized in healthcare or which prisoners are at risk of reoffending,” according to Dan McQuillan from the University of London.
This illustrates the broader implications of AI and inequality in critical decision-making processes. McQuillan added that AI inevitably increases what historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “institutional thoughtlessness.”
The great and uncomfortably honest philosopher, Arendt, often talked about the “banality of evil,” having been a Jew in the time of Hitler. AI is banal.
The Hidden Costs of Technological Advancement
AI is the massive consolidator and concentrator of power and wealth. It is the ultimate tool by which the elite can manipulate and control people. With AI, every child, woman and man can have an AI companion to monitor and control their every thought and move. The sheer scale of AI systems means that only a handful of the most powerful companies in the world can afford to run them.
“The amount of compute used in frontier AI models has been increasing ~4x a year,” Mohit Agarwal and Abhi Desai wrote for The Stanford Review. “Major AI lab CEOs are predicting $1 billion and even $10 billion training runs. Only a select number of closed-source model providers (e.g., Google, Microsoft) will be able to underwrite these ever-increasing costs.”
That’s all a very deliberate consolidation of power play by Big Tech.
AI and Inequality: Environmental Impact and Ethical Concerns
All the while, the Great Big Lying Machine and its Big Tech greenwashers gaslight society. By hiding as much as possible of Big Tech’s environmental harm, they can flood the world with all these happy stories of how AI is actually saving the environment. When Microsoft went all in on AI and its pollution exploded, it was pumping out stories like this:
An animal skitters through the heavy underbrush of the Colombian forest. An AI tool called MegaDetector identifies and classifies the results. Could this picture of genus Dasyprocta, a rodent-like creature better known as an agouti, help solve the puzzle of deforestation that has plagued the Amazon for years?
We don’t need AI to figure out what needs to be done in the Amazon. We need to stop mining. We need to stop industrial agriculture, mass logging and the genocide of the indigenous people. The biggest problems we face do not need AI.
Related Article: Is AI Stealing Earth's Lunch Money? The Environmental Impact of AI
AI and Inequality: Environmental Impact and Ethical Concerns
AI is the ultimate expression of the Silicon Valley tech bro character. AI speak is Silicon Valley speak: super-confident-sounding white emptiness. Fake-it-until-you-make-it arrogance. And make-sure-to-move-fast-and-break-things disdain for our environment. AI is growth hacking its way to environmental devastation.
The Great Big Lying Machine is being sold as a Fact Machine and a Knowledge Engine. It is managed by people who consider “factual accuracy” as “an area of active research.” The reality is they intended to create a Great Big Lying Machine because, from advertising to politics, there’s a lot of money and power to be gained from lying. The normalization of lies in AI systems underscores the urgency of addressing AI and inequality.
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AI is made by people who inhabit a moral and ethical void and emptiness. They weigh the business case between truth and lies and come down on the side of lies. Truth is boring. It doesn’t help growth. Truth isn’t fast. It’s too slow. It’s an inconvenience.
Lies are clickbait. Lies are fast. Let’s go with lies.
After all, the tech bros think that they can get away with a Great Big Lying Machine because lies have been so normalized due to Big Tech, social media and other forces. They don’t even have to pretend that truth matters, because they know that AI’s primary purposes are advertising and political propaganda — as they are essentially one and the same. Ultimately, addressing AI and inequality is crucial for creating a more just society.
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