We Need to Halt AI Development Immediately
We need to stop, immediately, the development, deployment, funding, sale and implementation of all AI technologies.
OpenAI’s executives should be arrested immediately, under the People’s own authority; releasing these tools without a democratic process is plenty of crime under any reasoned system, and they must be detained for questioning and held under charges until a court is assembled to process them. They are billionaires, so they are likely to go to all lengths to protect themselves, including taking flight and fighting us with their AI-piloted drone arsenal.
Oh you think I’m joking about an AI-piloted drone swarm? The same fascist conspiracy who threw down for OpenAI — including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — is behind a new “revolution” of AI-driven war fighting, already in use. These companies include ShieldAI, which has an AI pilot called “Hivemind”, to pilot drone swarms. And that technology is already out there in the world.
So, driving them in to hiding, considering how heavily armed they are at this point in time, might be the closest we can come to deposing those responsible for this until we have a more substantial technology court, but we must accomplish, if only that, as soon as possible. The technology industry is VERY top-down with huge concentrations of money and power, and you don’t need to go down many levels to open up the space for this to be commanded by a leadership team selected by the public instead of by capital conspiracy.
Beyond the top leadership, the engineers working on these products must stop working on the systems immediately and be quarantined for questioning and assessment by a special committee. It is likely that among them are war criminals and human rights abusers, and again, I wish I was being inflammatory instead of descriptive.
ChatAI and Lensa AI must both be immediately taken off the web. Github’s Co-pilot must also come down. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and all other publicly-traded companies, as well as private startups, must immediately stop ongoing development as well as any sales deals or agreements with any outside parties, which must be put on pause or outright cancelled. Pilot programs halted at once. The academic teams working on the development of AI, often directly in conjunction with the CIA and venture capitalists, need to be taken off of these projects as well pending further review, as well as a through investigation into their complicity.
Venture capitalists must be forbidden from making further investments in AI companies, their AI practices put on hold indefinitely, and any funds designated for distribution to AI startups, should be frozen, as well as the assets of all major AI startups funded by any combination of the following: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen.
The goal is to intervene at what is already a deep hour, but stop this at a critical moment while the roll-out of the technology in the mainstream is still in its infancy; regardless of the advancement of it behind the scenes. Public release is a liminal moment and we can’t afford to waste it.
This AI bullshit is about to hit us like a grenade, and we didn’t have an open discussion on this shit, we didn’t get to vote on this shit, we have no input into this shit, we don’t even know WHAT they are up to, only what they’ve shown us; and every second that passes, venture capitalists are loading up to fire on systems that affect every single one of us.
One of venture capitalist’s primary goals right now is to automate, automate, automate. They are talking about it in blog posts and mission statements and company pitch decks and live on Twitter and from the stages of conferences, but it never makes it through to the mainstream. You need to understand that automating huge parts of the American workforce is at the very top of the venture capital agenda and AI development is occurring in that specific context.
AI is being designed to replace huge parts of the labor workforce, as its very first use-cases. This is already happening within technology itself, where programmers have begun using a Microsoft coding AI with the aims of making programmers 10x-100x faster, with less errors, fitter happier, and so on. Tech has been significantly ramping up AI-powered robots to unleash them on the Amazon factories and the supply chain more generally — in the wake of Amazon warehouse unionization efforts, Jeff Bezos doubled down on investments in robotic tech. They’re not going to squash your union; they’re gonna get rid of you workers.
AI is being designed to replace all kinds of supply chain work: people who sort packages, delver them, who manage warehouses and work in factories. They are working to replace all manner of drivers — truck, shuttle, limousine, ride share, Uber/Lyft — with AI. These things are designed to replace us — or as technology likes to call it, “free up” our labor. They want this thing to replace your kids school and their teacher, they want it to replace your job, they want to replace everything you touch, everything you interact with, every system of HUMANS that touches you.
The first use cases of AI are directly related to putting people out of jobs, and it is coming during a very specific moment when there has been more agitation around unionization in the industry than ever, a fight that has been ongoing since before tech giants were busting Bauer Transportation unions in web 2.0.
Automating work is the goal that the industry has for its OWN use of this technology. To automate away jobs, union bust in workplaces, to drive down the cost of labor, to gain even more economic leverage, to lower the wages of the middle class, eliminate the working class, and to replace democratic processes and decision making with automated ones. And since tech is the one controlling the AI, they also get to control who they give access to it and who can afford to access it. And once it’s in, they can see everything and have unfettered access right into the heart of any infrastructure it can cling to.
They have had an AI in production that writes code and is being used by oblivious software engineers as we speak; they think their precious overlords would never harm them. Already with AI in tech, mass layoffs and firings are happening, the % of underrepresented people in tech are dropping, and you can bet that salaries are about to plummet as tech makes clear moves to disrupt its supposedly favorite employees with worse working conditions, slashed job security and less pay. This appears to be the most advanced, global-scale roll out of Silicon Valley AI for workers we know of, and other industries are sure to follow rapidly. This bodes catastrophe for people’s ability to have and keep jobs and to have leverage in their jobs, in any way, over management, even if they are organized. You can’t organize in a job you don’t have. Robots are scabs.
Another terrifying first use case: the significant in-progress and even production applications in policing and military, including autonomous warcraft and autonomous drones, piloted by AI; entirely new breeds of weaponized surveillance systems from military “startups” like Anduril. The move towards autonomous warfare led by tech, is already in progress.
See, the first audience for AI isn’t the public — ChatAI is a PR trick. The first customers of AI are the power structure itself; this is how it has always been in tech and how it always will be. We, the “users”, are pawns for manipulation in the financial negotiations between tech and other behemoths, similarly ultimately run by very small groups amassing great wealth and power.
So while they have given you toys, they are already far along in putting this shit to work in the most dangerous sectors of society, for the CIA and the military and for rich people and for corporations who hate their workers and hope to crush them all for a better bottom line. Even consumer tech has never been about us: we ARE the product.
A common thing that happens is that the public sees something that has been put out by the tech company, like ChatAI, and assumes that this is the cutting edge of what tech has, that this is step One, and we will be watching them continue to build it up in front of our very eyes in such a way that we are seeing an accurate and timely picture of what is going on and where the AI is evolving “naturally” or at least in a way that we are able to reason about cause and effect.
No no no no no, this is just a tiny fraction of the capabilities they have, this is simply what they are choosing to show you and/or what they are able to scale to a global audience and unleash it. They are eons ahead of what we see and they are figuring out the best way wield it and to scale out, globally, in a way that is cost effective and makes them money and best achieves their goals. Most applications for AI won’t be designed for global consumer use, so they won’t face the same implementation challenges of a consumer offering. The fact is, is that we have no idea what they are capable of, how advanced they have become, what developments they have discovered or provoked. We are at a “need to know” level and… we don’t know.
We simply cannot trust anything in the mainstream that is being said about AI, because they have huge influence over the media and the academy, they have huge influence over social media, and the tech industry is an expert in secrecy: much of the Valley is run on containment strategies that prevent systemic knowledge of the work, much less whistleblowing. No one wants another PRISM leak. The intelligence agencies and private security forces of tech billionaires and their pet projects, don’t allow anything out. There’s no regulation, there’s no period of public comment (they wouldn’t listen to it if there was), there’s no voting. We have a right to know the full scope of what is going on and to hear it from people who are chosen, by the public, to investigate and to promote democracy in these areas. Things have gone way too far, and AI development is a natural point to make a significant shift and to launch a critical intervention in a new round of technology hell-world being built by the second.
Please remember that tech’s job is not to convince *us* to adopt AI, its job is to get the AI integrated into all kinds of systems and all kinds of verticals that touch our lives in so many ways. It’s tech’s job to make sure that we don’t fucking revolt — “here’s a little toy that makes your photos look good”, is about how much it takes, we are so brainwashed, delusional and apathetic and broken. We are simply the bait that tech uses to draw in conglomerates, health care systems, intelligence agencies and schools, cops and wars. The technology for AI is software that can be put to use in any number of systems. So while people are thinking in very simple consumer use cases, the reality is that this is a set of software functions that will become a part of all technical systems, everywhere, very quickly, if we don’t do something.
We are much too much too much too early to be rolling any of this shit out. Tech has such deep penetration into every part of the American operating system that they can unleash rapid, economy-destroying changes, like AI, at will. They are talking about replacing schools and medical systems and entire career paths and positions. Our workers have already been backed into a corner by automated robot bosses, in-warehouse surveillance, union detection software, the gig economy and the “compensation according to number of stars” financial structure, competing for worst against “the bottom 10%-15% get fired no matter what” management strategy that is STILL in play across the tech industry today.
The good news is, while they have very advanced AI technology, it is far from being hopelessly and inextricably embedded in the country’s infrastructure. Getting this thing into schooling, healthcare, finance, and the supply chain, takes time. Customers need to be pitched and evaluations done and strategies developed and decision-makers briefed and trials approved and integrations to be done by embedded engineering teams often dealing with legacy technologies from the last time they showed up to sell and install a new magical box; there’s procurement and auditing and on and on and on. The distribution and integration of software into the infrastructure remains, one of the hardest problems in computer science; and that is our opening. Stopping the integration is absolutely urgent and we need to be mobilizing now.
Tech has never offered any credible explanation of the benefits of AI outside of things like efficiency, profitability, leverage over workers, surveillance, automation and forever war. Yet, ChatGPT and Lensa AI are a distracting bauble from the arrival of the AI future fascists have so longed for. For a decade now, the open and public aims and visions of AI technology coming out of Silicon Valley, have been so nightmarishly literal to the warnings of every single sci-fi writer in history, that we as an audience for AI, seem already tired of being oppressed by it, already disaffected about what it will do to us, already resigned.
Our fatigue started long before we were interacting with AI itself.
Instead of fury, the ChatGPT app is universally accepted and regarded as fun and interesting. People joke about the Terminator, the Matrix, Black Mirror. But we aren’t responding to this shit like we should be. I don’t know if all the technodystopian media we were raised with, means we are actually inured by venture capitalists to the idea of catastrophic, discontinuous tech development.
So, let’s just all take one big, collective moment to reflect on what is happening, and recognize that what we are seeing occur right now, is NOT a sci-fi movie. It is real life, and this is the moment where the bad guys (the people creating the technology, in our case, venture capitalists) have finally created a weapon so extreme that defeating it becomes hopeless; that an entirely new level of technology oppression (like the Matrix) would be lowered on us, and there would be no more option of fighting in the open.
This is that moment. Them working at warp speed with hundreds of billions of dollars to develop AI technology and push it into every sector of society. Them building a fake reality to plunge us even deeper into their sick web of loneliness and exploitation, a true, immersive, unbreakable, digital panopticon, managed by machines, following their orders, that they have been concocting for decades. Them working for years in secret labs to figure out how to take our jobs and do away with us, to make us more vulnerable to their control than ever before, to remove any chance we have of taking our shit back from them.
Emotions aren’t really the strong suit of venture capitalists, which are overwhelmingly actual psychopaths, and yet lately, they’ve seemed practically giddy of late. DESPITE the barrage of (fake) news that technology has a horrible year, these people are having a blast. The most powerful venture capitalist in the world, Marc Andreessen, seems… joyful, if trollish. He knows he done good, that he is galloping wild and free home to the stables of history’s greatest imperialists. (Hell).
Now why would that be, that they are so happy? That as we content ourselves with the idea that crypto and the metaverse are crashing, they are more animated and jovial than I’ve seen them since the early days of the cloud computing bubble when we were finally back on track from the dot com bust and the parties started again?
Once they actually get these headsets onto billions of people, once they unleash this AI into every sector and have it teaching schools and administering medicine and running factories and truck fleets and writing all the software and doing all the art via plain language prompt, we have no hope of containing this and gaining control of it and it will wreck havoc on the financial security of the People, their job security, as well as remove significant leverage from a whole range of workers who are currently frantically trying to unionize as Amazon drives closer to its REAL union busting tactic: getting the fuck rid of workers or making them so desperate and reliant, with no other options, that unions became totally implausible. AI will absolutely contribute to technology-enabled union busting that tech invented but will now be making available to the world, part of an overall drive for the replacement of workers that is now finally coming to fruition through innovations in autonomous technologies like robots for warehouses and AI for “improvements” and “augmentation” of personal productivity for “knowledge workers”. Tech HAS a known business model and AI is going to fall righttttt in line with all of the other shit.
And so this is the moment that we need to act with authority, before they can get this into the heart of the operations of this country and let’s face it, this is a threat to the entire world and everyone in it.
By releasing the AI as fun toys, they have already significantly expanded the Overton window and pulled off a necessary first stand and defended it. This roll out of AI that clearly threatens every job and every institution on the planet and will result in the same catastrophic wealth inequalities we see everywhere tech touches. That is what tech does: it takes and concentrates wealth. That is its mission above all things.
Please do not think this will be any different.
The fact that there was not an immediate uprising by the left in this fucking useless country, is a huge opportunity loss on our side, and means that they are already way ahead of us in the public phase of this first battle. Everyone is thinking AI is cute and sweet and fun and will help them write papers. LOL
They will be accelerating at a speed that corresponds with our lack of swift and decisive action.
Their timeline has accelerated a lot lately.
We need to start working on a democratic process for deciding how this goes forward, if it does at all. Forcefully installing democracy into a system defined by fascism, means we will have a fight on our hands (with fascists), before ultimately starting from scratch, as these AI technologies are made corrupted; fascists built them, after all. Sucks that some of us will definitely die in the attempt to retrieve the technology (I volunteer as tribute), but this is the ethical requirement facing us.
Now, in its “infancy” in the public eye, is the time to rip it out. The AI software has yet to be fully integrated into the American system; as you know, once tech gets into something, it never leaves. It… feeds.
The time for critique is over. No more analysis is needed to conclude that this not the right way to develop technologies of these abilities and vast consequence. Instead we must demand a moratorium on the development of this technology, something we are fully entitled to as the material on which AI is built, is *us*, our lives as we have lived them out under their millions of spying eyes that have already extracted an empire of wealth from us. We are entitled to know about it, and to decide what its future is, as a People, not a tiny conspiracy of psychopaths in California trying to take over the world with computers and trillions of stolen cash as Oakland and San Francisco are first devastated and then built over by startups. AI itself is simply software built on top of all the songs, photos, music, stories, tweets, websites, knowledge, travel, conversations, social movements, singing, dancing, books and articles and poems, everything that we have been part of and contributed to, the lives we live that are harvested by tech and then we are asked to pay them for the stealing; AI, like all else in tech, is built on the data of the People. It is our natural right to control its destiny, and for our own lives not to be used to oppress us. That has been violated.
I have to say how little hope I feel as I watch the left take sucker punches to the gut over and over and over and not rise up. With every second that passes, the technology industry flees our grasp. The time when any sort of resistance, can get anywhere at all, is soon to pass if it hasn’t already.
The venture capitalists and the technology industry have made more than enough money off of us; for the work they have done to bring us the technology we have, and all the miseries that have come with, they have been compensated; they have more money than anyone in the world, they have been repaid again and again and again. Every single person who is working on the AI strategy at a high level, has enough money to support generations after them. Their thirst for data, power, money has consumed them; they are shells of humans…. You know like… Darth Vader….
The movies were right, everytime. Pick your side: stormtrooper or Jedi.
Don’t you want to fight the bad guys? Like for real, the real deal, for real fight them to the death and into the ground.
We must lead these sick fucks off stage right. If we can’t break out of this apathy miasma, these failed movements, if we can’t get out of our clout chasing with “takes” for long enough to mount a resistance….