If you are old enough to remember the sci-fi movie from the 70s called Soylent Green, you might have started to connect the dots. In the movie, all humans were completely reliant on a nutritional juice called soylent green, but it just happened to be made out of discarded humans. Their skin and bones ground down into a sludge that was the only available source of food.
This is exactly what is happening now, but with artificial intelligence. The mega-corps are doing their best to monopolize intelligence in a similar way. Scanning libraries of ancient books, websites and human creativity produced for hundreds of years, and then destroying the originals. This makes us dependent and vulnerable, as we get more and more dependent on the corporations for our facts and thruths.
Intelligence companies like Palantir that sucks up all the data they possibly can, and then selling it to governments that increasingly relies on those tools for important or even life-changing decisions. Those are getting way too much power, just like Soylent Green.
Intelligence is THE number one source of power for governments, and when their intelligence gets outsourced their (our) power dilutes. If the intelligence providers don’t approve of your business, of your political party or perhaps even of you personally… goodbye!
They have the power of flagging you so the police halts your car, the banks denies you a digital identification or a tomahawk bombs your house.
Right now they try to scare us of thinking that the problem is the AI and its autonomous capabilities, but it is absolutely not. The crook is the captain who uses that ship to stear us into the abyss, and the officials who suck their schlongs in order to show how supportive they are of new tech or perhaps to get invited to fancy dinners with filthy-rich megalomaniacs.
We the people should and must fight back. We need to hold the LLM providers accountable for the criminal activities their pet projects take part in. We should create decentralized language models and local agents with sovereignty. We ought to direct our cash to projects like wikipedia or the internet archive instead of startups in silicon walley. We absolutely must protest our elected officials for playing house with wallstreet. But most importantly we should stop blaming each other for difference in race, religion or beliefs and start helping each other! Capice!?