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https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/05/how-ai-will-embolden-the-tyranny-of-big-tech/

The emergence of artificial intelligence marks the latest acceleration of the digital age. Like any revolution, this one has winners and losers and will likely transform the relationship between people and machines. It could also lend yet more power to Big Tech and their technocratic elites in government.

Just as the Industrial Revolution elevated manufacturers and their financiers over the old aristocratic classes, the current shift erodes the power of the large industrial, often unionised, corporations and hosts of smaller businesses, in favour of a small coterie of elite firms, which are aggressively anti-union and have an unprecedented hold on both the capital markets and increasingly the human consciousness.

In the past, a major tech breakthrough would have naturally created a market for upstarts. The first phase of the digital revolution in the early 21st century caught many larger players, like IBM and AT&T, flat-footed as firms like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook (now Meta) emerged, eventually well surpassing them in market value. These firms have now secured quasi-monopolistic control of everything from mobile browsers, operating-system software and online advertising sales. They also control two-thirds of the world’s cloud service infrastructure, which is critical for AI.

These Big Tech companies drive the economy, and with them the fortunes of the three-fifths of Americans invested in the stock market. About 60 per cent of the S&P 500’s gains for the year have been driven by just five tech companies – Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet (the parent company of Google). Altogether, seven tech stars, adding Tesla and Apple, account for a remarkable 30 per cent of the index’s total value, a domination almost unprecedented in market history.

These same companies are uniquely positioned to raise the trillions of dollars that are needed to develop AI capacity – at a time when cash for startups is at the lowest ebb in five years. Among the AI superpowers, there is only one relative newcomer, Nvidia. It started out mostly selling chips to the videogame industry, but its hardware has since become essential to the AI boom. Overall the field is utterly dominated by the top giant interests.

The new Silicon Valley dream is not to build a great company, like Apple or Amazon, but to merge with a larger company. In 2023, the AI market was valued at $42 billion, with most of that belonging to Apple, Microsoft and Alphabet. According to two analysts writing in the New York Times, Silicon Valley has ‘learned how to co-opt potentially disruptive start-ups before they can become competitive threats’.

In the process, suggests former US attorney general William Barr, these firms have found a way to ‘pre-empt the normal evolution of emerging markets’ so that new firms become satellites in the ‘solar systems’ of Big Tech. Far from disrupting the current Silicon Valley oligopoly, AI is helping to sustain it. Not surprisingly, as newbies, younger AI founders are mostly on the outside looking in. This year’s Forbes billionaire study shows only one per cent are under 40, the lowest level in over 20 years.

Of course, AI could bring benefits to society in education, medicine and even helping to maintain infrastructure. But it also poses huge environmental, political and social challenges. For one thing, AI is very ‘energy hungry’. A recent Dutch study found that by 2027 AI could need as much electricity as the entirety of the Netherlands. Already Google and Microsoft, which brag about their low-energy imprint, use more electricity than Iceland, Ghana, the Dominican Republic and Tunisia. In coming years, AI developers will be forced to compete for juice not only with other industries but also households. The energy demand tied to AI now consumes four per cent of all US electricity, but that is slated to rise to as much as 25 per cent by the end of the decade.

The rise of AI could upset labour markets. The class impact of AI is a legitimate fear shared by many agencies around the world, such as the IMF. Recent advances in robotics suggest that many lower-end jobs at fast-food restaurants and hotels can be replaced by robots. I have seen models of new robots that can flip burgers, make beds and clean bathrooms. Such automation is already happening at places like Sweetgreens, Shake Shack and Chipotle.

These innovations could greatly reduce the current need for unskilled labour, much of it from developing countries. Even personal assistants could be replaced by what one developer calls ‘something like your personal AI’. Other firms are developing new robotic nannies (a recent study of three- to six-year-olds found they trust machines more than people). AI eventually could even reduce demand for ‘the world’s oldest profession’ by outsourcing sex to compliant and enhanced AI-powered machines.

These threats seem likely to have political repercussions. The liberal think-tank, Brookings, and researchers at MIT have advanced proposals to tax robots who replace human workers. As usual, California is at the cutting edge here. Having passed massive mandatory pay increases for fast-food workers, the state government and the city of San Francisco are now looking at ways to keep workers employed, including by a robot tax. Legislation to tax autonomous vehicles has already been passed in San Francisco.

Eighty-two per cent of millennials fear AI could reduce their work prospects and pay. According to McKinsey, at least 12million Americans will be forced to find new work by 2030. These AI refugees will not be limited to low-end workers. AI could also wreak havoc on the professional classes. Immediately, the biggest impacts will be at the more prosaic fields like paralegals, executive assistants, accountants and administrators – all fields long dominated by women.

Already the market for professionals has declined, as the need for newly minted graduates has also declined markedly. Even the ‘tech bros’ are threatened. President Biden, among others, may have urged traditional workers to ‘learn to code’, but even ‘geeks’, particularly those just entering the market, are already proving extremely vulnerable to what economists refer to as ‘skills-based technological change’. AI’s imaging and replicative powers are also likely to reduce opportunities in the film industry and other cultural fields, as technology begins to do everything from developing fake characters to writing scripts.

Of course, some elite AI engineers could experience a windfall. But AI’s arrival has already sparked job losses in Silicon Valley, the epicentre of AI development. In part to finance its drive to AI, Google has recently laid off 12,000 workers, a number that is expected to grow to 30,000. On the east coast, IBM has put its staff hiring on hold while assessing how mid-level jobs can be replaced by AI. The damage may be even greater for those in the gig economy. Within months of AI’s emergence, freelance work in software declined markedly, along with pay, as more developers began using generative AI to automate their code.

Whatever its long-run impacts, AI seems likely to intensify the already stark levels of political polarisation. It threatens both the professional classes that dominate left-of-centre parties around the globe, perhaps sparking greater extension of the welfare state, while also threatening the livelihoods of working-class families, increasingly the bulwark of the political right.

Some jobs are likely to be safer from the impact of AI, notably those in skilled manual work. As college degrees have been losing value for decades, hands-on physical jobs like mechanics, welders or electricians, as more young people now recognise, offer greater opportunities and fewer uncertainties. As artificial-intelligence pioneer Rony Abovitz suggests, the big winner in the coming years will be the ‘sophisticated, technically capable blue-collar worker’.

In this increasingly disrupted economic environment, with diminished opportunities for many, control of messaging gains increased importance. The move to control internet speech is no longer restricted to dictatorships like Russia, China and Iran but is spreading to increasingly nominal democracies including Canada, France, the UK and Brazil. Brazil’s Supreme Court recently ordered internet providers in the country to block access to X, due to Elon Musk’s refusal to accept censorship. Other alarms are being sounded on the arrest in France of Pavel Durov, founder of the widely used Telegram app.

We may see our future in China, where resentment against the regime exists, even among the middle class, but any dissent is monitored through cameras and digital surveillance. With assistance and funding from Western tech firms, the Middle Kingdom employs AI as a tool supporting total surveillance of its citizenry.

Alarmingly, many tech, academic and media elites – with the notable exception of Musk – are advocating greater speech control. Although Donald Trump and his MAGA legions are routinely seen as the supreme threat to democratic values, the most persistent advocates for censorship come from the left, the Democratic Party and the now overwhelmingly progressive media.

After all, it was ‘liberal’ Joe Biden who pressured the likes of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to censor Covid-related information and news, such as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, that might have damaged Biden’s 2020 campaign. Ironically, most opposition to censorship today comes largely from the right – the traditional source of speech repression – most notably from the Texas state government and from the oddball Elon Musk (himself a newly minted Texan). Well-connected Big Tech apologists like Francis Fukuyama don’t want the rubes in Texas and Florida to have any say over the technology that shapes their economic and personal lives.

Although rich and powerful, Musk remains a minority voice. The call for more control of cyberspace continues to grow. AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li has spoken openly about a bigger role for government, universities and non-profits. This poses a particular problem given the general lack of diverse views inside the tech community or in the universities.

As we first saw with Covid, Big Tech’s government-approved curation has led to the banning of divergent views, even from world-recognised experts. Similarly, climate-policy sceptics – even when highly credentialed – are being consigned to the digital gulag by Google. Already ChatGPT basically offers its human receptacles only the Green Party line on energy.

The newly shaped reality can be seen already across the internet. Google pushes woke language and produces laughably diverse AI-generated images, even for such people as Nazis and Vikings, something so bizarre that the company has now restricted their use. When asked to portray ‘the two parties’, Chat GPT’s DALL-E image generator shows Democrats as a ‘diverse’, urban and modern while the GOP, despite its gains among minority voters and large suburban base, is shown as a retrograde party representative of rural backwaters.

AI could make such control even more pervasive, as people look to the algorithms to do their thinking and data gathering for them. Increasingly, the oligarchs also control the information pipeline themselves. Already Big Tech’s Übermenschen own the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and Time, while nonprofits, mainly funded by oligarchs, now subsidise coverage at once-respectable places like the Associated Press and National Public Radio with cash grants. At the same time, AI employees concerned about these issues often find themselves stifled by confidentiality agreements.

California, as is too often the case, could define the future. It is currently looking to pass legislation that would offer newsrooms compensation for the brazen theft of intellectual property that is necessary for Google’s AI efforts. The state has proposed that Google will hand $250 million, pocket change to such a large firm, to hard-hit local newsrooms. Even the normally supine LA Times denounced the deal as ‘bowing’ to Google and other AI developers. The media guild accurately characterised it as ‘a shakedown’.

If this goes through, it will essentially allow Google and other tech firms to shape news coverage even further. There’s not likely to be much coverage of tech abuses, climate sceptics or free-speech advocates. Instead, the media will become an even more reliable funnel for ‘progressive’ views. This is assured given that the state proposes to hand control of the money to, of all places, the social-justice oriented journalism school at UC Berkeley, the most leftist major university in the US.

California, which incubates often crazy ideas and then markets them to the rest of the world, has also passed legislation that seeks to limit what are seen as damaging impacts from AI. This measure is supported by Musk and dissident tech bros, but opposed by most Big Tech players and their political operatives, including the all-powerful Nancy Pelosi.

Many startups and some venture capitalists understandably fear that attempts to impose regulatory constraints on AI will stymie new ventures. They might also wonder if all the AI hype will match reality. Last year, AI made $3 billion in revenue – pittance compared with the tens of billions in outgoings. Nancy Pelosi may have made millions on her own Nvidia stocks, but for the masses, another dot-com disaster could strike before AI reaches its maturity.

To be sure, some regulation on AI may be necessary. Far more important will be curbing the tech oligarchies, perhaps turning them into regulated utilities, while restricting their ability to absorb serious competitors. Jonathan Kanter, the top US antitrust enforcer, has proposed, in an interview with the Financial Times, to look ‘with urgency’ at monopoly choke points and the ‘competitive landscape’.

Yet this may prove a challenge in particular to an incoming Harris administration, which is likely to bow more to her Big Tech backers. Yet so powerful is the Big Tech lobby, it will be tough to challenge no matter who is in office. The desperate need to have some ‘next big thing’ to drive up stock prices could lead politicians and investors of all political stripes to regard any pushback against the emerging AI dominion as a threat.

But it’s not too late, as we plug AI into our life and society, to recognise the clear risk to liberal democracy posed by the unchallenged rule of tech overlords. Our great task in the coming years is to make sure their bid for power never gets fully installed.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.