We’re going to try this thing again. I’m going to toss a brief idea out there and see what responses come back. Maybe the response is merely that someone thinks about something differently, and that is just fine. But maybe there can be some discussion… though it is harder to negotiate the comments on WordPress this week… But I will soldier through it. So here is the first sally…
I know I have been complaining about AI a bit recently. This is not because I have much against computer intelligence, though I think that what we are labeling machine learning is far less than what we make of it. (It’s also far short of the intelligence seen in an average fruit fly.) It is also not because computers, and machines generally, are taking away wages from humans. This is not a new thing and is not something that can be addressed by taking on computers. This is a system problem. Machines doing human jobs without pay is a symptom, not the cause.
No, my abiding grudge against AI is not that it’s going to take over the world… that’s just ignorance talking. I mean really! Nothing so helplessly dependent can take over anything. This thing uses enormous amounts of energy and resources to do what humans do, using essentially nothing more than what it takes to keep a body alive — which is something AI will never achieve. Life, that is…
My beef with AI is the same problem I have with things like flying and plastic waste and claiming that consumers are driving ecological destruction. (Which is also ignorance talking.) My problem with AI is that it is the result of a conscious decision to inflict harm upon the world for private benefit. It’s not AI taking over the world. It’s some few humans using AI to further control the rest of us and take from us what little we’ve managed to scavenge from the degradation that these few people have caused.
What does AI do? Like all our machines, it reduces labor costs by eliminating high-paid skilled workers. There are just as many wage hours. Maybe more. But the tasks of middle management and professionals are transferred to a machine while the jobs remaining — building, transporting, feeding data and resources into the machine, and coping with the machine’s copious waste stream — are low paying and usually out-sourced, usually to distant places and peoples. Particularly the waste streams.
Luddites recognized that their lucrative and highly skilled jobs creating textiles were being eliminated so that other people would be paid lower wages — much lower — to run a machine. There were as many or more jobs — low-paying wage jobs, not self-directed professions where most of the benefits of sales and service go to the professional. More jobs, but skilled crafts-people could no longer make a living. They were obliged to seek out wage employment at wages that were sufficiently low to generate large revenues for the machine-owning wage-paying industrialists. This was not done to increase productivity or streamline manufacturing. It was a way for the elites to wrest work and its resulting profit out of newly impoverished people. And this is exactly what AI is doing.
Luddites recognized that industry was actually theft, from themselves and from many others. Industry was not a way to meet the needs of society, it was a way to create rampant need — because people could no longer meet their own needs with their own labor and resources. But Luddites vented their ire on the machines, breaking industrial looms and burning factories. They did not and probably could not go after the actual cause of their immiseration — the industrialists, the actual people who made conscious decisions to steal from the world. And this too is exactly what AI is doing.
Similarly, corporations, the original AI, are not self-directing entities. Corporate activity is the result of individual decisions. Like all machines, corporations do not act on their own. They are programmed. They are controlled by human decisions, and these decisions are usually made by a very few people who are at the top of the corporate hierarchy. Not coincidentally these decision making people are the only people who derive much benefit from the decisions made.
No it isn’t AI. It isn’t oil. It isn’t insurance (well, maybe it’s insurance…). It’s the people who are consciously and with malicious intent making decisions that harm others, that destroy the foundations of life, just so they can reap some short-term increase in monetary wealth. That they are being harmed as well does not absolve them of their decisions. Their greed is all that is causing all this. Not AI. Not corporations. Not some amorphous meta-being market. It is people actively causing this for their own benefit, and largely forcing the rest of us to comply with their decisions.
Yet, we are not casting blame on the guilty. Though even if we did, I think they are psychopathic enough to slough off any resultant guilt. (You and I could not be titans of industry and still be able to sleep at night.) Still, we are not naming the cause as it is. We are casting blame on machines… when it is not machines. It is never machines. Machines are just programmed tools. The blame lies where it always has: in the misanthropic decisions of a very few humans.
©Elizabeth Anker 2025
By My Solitary Hearth 
And let’s also blame the shareholders!
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Eliza hit the nail on the proverbial head (no pun intended): “It’s not AI taking over the world. It’s some few humans using AI to further control the rest of us and take from us what little we’ve managed to scavenge from the degradation that these few people have caused.” AI is not something new, it is merely the logical development of the thinking machine, aka computer. The rise of the machines, that Luddites so hated, was accompanied by the Enclosure Acts, the privatization of the land, aka commons. By depriving people of the means of subsistence, they were forced into the colonial dependency of wage slavery.
A similar dynamic is occurring with AI. AI is the “enclosure acts” of the computer age. While control of food and the means of subsistence has always been a staple of patriarchal dominance, the modern takers have found more sophisticated ways of domination by controlling the way people think about the world – and more importantly what they think. AI along with mass and social media has become an extraordinarily effective means of controlling people by letting the machines (and social media) do their thinking for them. Informed people, capable of independent, critical thinking is the greatest threat to capitalist-consumer society and the oligarchs that control it.
It is no surprise that one of the first things that Trump and his buddy the Musk-rat, are pushing for is massive taxpayer subsidies for developing AI. Abrogating the human capability to think for ourselves is the way that fascism has come to Amerika, complete with inaugural Nazi salutes! To quote Julian Assange, “The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen.” An old English folk poem put it another way:
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
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Here’s an interesting update to my comment:
How Meta’s Policy Updates Could Encourage Hate and Threaten Democracy
portside.org/2025-01-25/how-metas-policy-updates-could-encourage-hate-and-threaten-democracy
The changes by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, could have far-reaching and dire effects.
January 25, 2025 Lindsey Shelton Southern Poverty Law Center
“What you’re going to see is a flood of propaganda, hate speech and extremism in the form of videos, memes, fake AI-generated articles, AI-generated images, videos and audio that are going to be indistinguishable from genuine content,” he said. “It’s going to lead to an information collapse where, really, what’s going to happen is people are no longer going to be able to adequately determine what is real from not real.”
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