Who’s afraid of AI?

When it comes to “artificial intelligence,” there are so many hopes and fears that touch on the most fundamental questions of existence, consciousness, freewill, and what type of society we are creating.

A 2023 Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 65% of Americans express concern about AI’s direction. The truth is that an Artificial Intelligence system has been operating for hundreds, if not thousands of years; it’s called the Economy. And it’s not your friend. It’s programmed to extract and centralize wealth at all costs. Its hardware is you and I and all humans living under its dominion. Its software is the bureaucracy and impersonal systems that govern our interactions.

From 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Terminator series, to The Matrix, most cautionary tales of AI imagine some dramatic fictional future moment—the Singularity—when the AI becomes “self-aware” and decides to act against humanity.

But what is the AI boogeyman, really? A non-human, unfeeling system that enforces its psychopathic agenda, regardless of the cost of human life and the suffering inflicted. This actually began happening long ago. And unlike most apocalyptic visions, this has been happening much more slowly and less cinematically than we imagined.

Imagine a system run by rules and enforcement without soul or humanity, enabled by human agents who serve that system by “just doing their job.” This is exactly what has been in place since we started writing spreadsheets on paper.

From the moment the concept of debt-based money was formalized and written down, the system of debt and capital functions as a societal virus that we now call the Economy.

The exact moment is hard to pinpoint because it’s more of a process than a moment. It could be the creation of the modern corporation. The 1604 Dutch East India Company and the 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company are two of the world’s first companies where a profit mandate was designed to supersede the importance of their human creators and to outlive any individual. However, it was likely far earlier than 1604 when the debt-based money system was created and imposed upon humanity through violence.

Indigenous gift economies, are objectively more sustainable for people and planet. They are based on an expected flow of mutual aid and trust-based interdependence, rather than exchanges of a transactional nature. Tracking debt formalizes hierarchy and breaks down systems built on equality and trust. Debt is the beginning of the dehumanization that allows an unconscious system (the debt system powering the Economy) to rule over conscious beings (humans as subservient to the Economy). In any case, we have certainly been living under this intelligent, omnipresent system whose goal is the endless accumulation of capital, where gravity (hoarding) overpowers entropy (wealth equality).

Things that people generally get wrong about AI:

It’s not Intelligent. I have to say this: there will never be a “singularity”. Any of the technologies grouped under the “Artificial Intelligence” label (machine learning, large language models, natural language processors, etc), driven by defined algorithms, will never be intelligent or conscious in the way that a living being is. Even once a semantic feedback engine with machine learning model (AI) can pass a Turing test, it will never have consciousness or awareness of what it is saying, because at the root, it is not driven by life force, it is driven by a simple mechanical program.
It’s not Individualized. The naive concept of an individualized, personality-driven anthropomorphic robot (everything from Star Wars to The Terminator to Blade Runner to Ex Machina) is simply not how connected technology works. AI is not a hermetic being within a physical body and never will be. It will always be connected to larger models and centralized data.
It’s not going to “change the world,” not in any structural sense. Advances in AI will change the aesthetics of Empire, not the balance of power. Because we are already running a more fundamental version of AI (the Economy), and WE are the software and hardware.

The group of technologies that we call AI is a simple extension of the same abstract system we already live under, optimized to accelerate it.

When we talk about AI, we should be talking about power. Who owns the tools? Who trains the models? Who sets the objectives? And whose lives are made disposable in the name of progress? Complex learning models, in the hands of the Economy, simply reinforce existing power structures; they will not create any new inequality.

The real danger of AI is not that it will become some evil supermind; it’s that the smallest, most violent, and aggressive minority will use it, as they’ve always used technology, to further entrench a system that treats life as secondary to profit. Technology, no matter how simple or complex, is only a tool for the system it is enforcing.

Artificial intelligence is not coming to destroy us. The Economy, which drives colonialism and imperialism, is already doing that. Unless we consciously, collectively, and courageously decide otherwise.