The rule of the Oligarchs and Machines is here
Ordinary humanity faces an emerging threat from the combined might of the Human Elites (billionaires and the military-political class) working with perhaps the greatest power the planet has ever seen: artificial intelligence. Their combined might has the potential to totally screw us. Happy New Year everyone.
2025 is set to be the ‘break-out year’ for artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg says we will see the arrival initially of thousands but soon billions of AI ‘agents’ who, via the major tech companies, will integrate themselves into our lives and perform an increasing number of tasks for us. An agent can be defined as “a software-based entity powered by artificial intelligence designed to perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions autonomously or semi-autonomously to achieve specific goals”. Some are calling it the dawn of the Age of AI or the Agentic Age.
For the time being AI will work foremost in the service of the lucky few. Deloittes forecasts that by the end of this year 25% of companies that currently deploy AI will have agents; by 2027 that will have grown to 50%. We all need to come to grips with AI concepts like '10,000 graduates’, 'Einstein in the Basement’, 'Prompt Engineering’, 'The Singularity’, 'Agents’, 'Generative AI’, ‘Artificial General Intelligence’, 'Large Language Models’ and more – because the future has arrived and most of us are not up-to-speed.
Luigi Mangione. An AI algorithm denied millions of health insurance claims.
Most people in the West have yawned their way through the genocide in Gaza – in part thanks to the sterling efforts of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI algorithms on Facebook. Luigi Mangione became a cult hero in the US for gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, partly because the company used an AI algorithm known as nH Predict that denied and overrode claims for millions of likely legitimate claimants. The war in Ukraine and on Palestine has accelerated research into autonomous drone warfare and "AI-driven military targeting technologies" that process vast amounts of data, including satellite imagery and private communications, to build kill lists. These are just a few examples of the combined power of AI and the elites that are being unleashed in a steady expansion of control.
First, let’s look at the Enemy Within: the elites who have shaped our economies, mediascapes, foreign policy and even our thoughts and preferences to suit their needs. Bernie Sanders gave a powerful address a few days ago. His comments apply equally to societies across the planet:
“We are in an extraordinarily pivotal and volatile moment in history, and things are moving very, very rapidly. The most important point that I want to stress today is how fast our country is evolving into an oligarchic society and into two very different Americas. Either we fight aggressively all over this country to create a government and an economy that works for all of us, or we will continue to move rapidly down the path of oligarchy and the rule of the super-rich.”
Bernie Sanders:
““We are in an extraordinarily pivotal and volatile moment in history.”
Sanders pointed out that three men – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. All three, by the way, have heavily invested in AI. Similarly, he says just three Wall Street firms – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – are the major shareholders in over 90% of S&P 500 companies, wielding incredible power over the American economy. Economic power is combined with political power as the wealthy buy politicians and political parties virtually at will. The mainstream media is already in the bag. It keeps our minds well away from this central issue in our system.
“Never before in our history have we seen a ruling class with so much political power,” Sanders says.
Now to the second great hinge moment we have reached: artificial intelligence overtaking humans in most areas of endeavour. These immensely powerful tools are under the control of a few hundred billionaires like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, working in discordant concert with the military-political elites. Something similar is happening in China, while the rest of the world, including Europe, lags behind.
The Large Language Models, like ChatGPT 4, have a lot more knowledge than any person. Top AI models are acquiring simultaneous competence in all the key arenas of knowledge, approaching 90% of the expertise of the smartest human specialists in each field. Lots of really great things come with this power but we need to be serious about balancing risk and opportunity – who gets to decide and who gets to benefit is front and centre.
Billions of jobs could go, countries that dominate the AI field will be vastly more powerful than those left behind, exacerbating our already disturbing imbalances in power. Digital warfare will be of an unimaginable nature and scale. Algorithmic biases will serve the interests of dominant groups in society. Manipulation of public opinion will be of an unprecedented reach and sophistication favouring, again, those with the best AI tools.
Mass surveillance, drilling down to the individual level, are all coming our way. And, of course, economic inequality will only get worse.
As we slip further into oligarchy, we need to wake up to the looming risk posed by the combined power of AI and the billionaires. We need to resist the heavy slumber of indifference and gullibility that presses down on us.
And then, of course, there is another risk: what happens if machines set their own goals and become free agents, untethered from human governance? That’s beyond my pay grade – and hotly debated – but many of the top human minds in the field have raised the alarm.
Professor Hinton: “We’ve never dealt with something like this before.”
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” says a letter from the Center for AI Safety, signed by over 600 of the world's top experts in the field, including Demis Hassabis CEO Google DeepMind, Sam Altman CEO OpenAI, Dario Amodei CEO Anthropic, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Hinton Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto.
“These things will get smarter than us and we have to worry about whether they will want to take control away,” Hinton said at the end of last year. They are a superior form of intelligence because of their ability to replicate themselves into many copies of the same neural network, each copy can analyse different sets of data and then seamlessly combine their learnings – “10,000 graduates”. The intelligence gap between us and them could be greater than between us and monkeys.
“We’ve never dealt with something like this before,” Hinton says.
Hinton is not given to hyperbole. He is a measured septuagenarian genius who won both the Turing Award (2018) and the Nobel Prize (2024) for his groundbreaking work on artificial deep learning, including back propagation, at the heart of AI. He resigned from Google in 2023, in part, to free himself to raise the alarm over what he assesses as an existential threat to humanity.
You know it is serious when Elon Musk is calling for government oversight – “because it’s a danger to the public”. He says there is a “non-trivial risk” of human civilisational destruction.
You know it is serious when Elon Musk is calling for government oversight.
A while ago Elon Musk asked: “What happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form? It’s very difficult to predict. It’s called The Singularity, like a Black Hole, you don’t know what happens after that. So I think we should be cautious with AI.”
Musk said something else really interesting: he doesn’t trust his fellow billionaires! He doesn’t believe they are taking the interests of humanity seriously enough. I couldn’t agree more.
Eugene Doyle