Living and Dying with Artificial Intelligence

“AI is at once a consummation of technological control and a new level of cultish delirium. The designers themselves are often incapable of explaining what their systems are doing.” (June 22, 2026, The New Yorker).

What is artificial intelligence (AI) and why do we need it? The billionaires who are convincing investors to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into expansion and development of AI have no answers to these questions. They tell us that their version of AI will change everything, but they are divided on whether AI will rule the world benevolently or decide to kill off humanity. They are confused, but they are marshalling billions of dollars for computer chips, thousands of acres of farmland, and millions of gallons of water to build data centers to teach their Large Language Model (LLM) machines about the world.

The input for this teaching is everything found online: all social media, literature, encyclopedias, math books, vast amounts of copyrighted material, and our chats and online transactions. This includes disgusting and violent language and pornography, so people in poor countries are hired to edit and clean up the input. They get low wages and mental distress from looking at the hateful images and language that comes off of platforms like X.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT from Open AI and Claude from Anthropic, can speak, write reports, produce videos, write novels, etc., when given a prompt. Humans train them to try to make sure they don’t include nasty ideas and images from X and other hateful platforms in their responses. They have been known to wave Nazi flags, promote child pornography, and encourage teenagers to commit suicide. These deviations are called “hallucinations."

Generative AI (GAI) can converse with us, “see” and make sense of visual material, and can create drawings, novels, music, and videos, and write code for new programs. Writers, film makers, journalists, programmers, as well as most office workers, can all be replaced. According to the New York Times of July 10. 2026, even many science PHDs, medical doctors, financial advisers, and others in high level professions are now being paid by the hour to train GAI programs like ChatGPT and Claude how to do their jobs. Workers at all levels will be replaced.

Building God?

Five big corporations – Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon – are racing to be the first to develop something called AGI or “artificial general intelligence”. This AGI is a program/ machine that knows everything and thinks like a human, but faster and better. Would it be creative, intuitive, and curious in the way that humans are? Doubtful. There is no definition of what AGI might be so it is anyone’s guess. These five partner with the model makers OpenAI (Sam Altman), Anthropic (Dario Amodei), and xAI (Elon Musk) to build AGI. Each corporation is racing to get computer chips, out-spend, out-build, and out-hype the others so they can be the first to put this mystical holy grail, AGI, on the market and control the world. Oh, and get there before China! Trump has declared that there be no regulation on AI – it is a question of national security.

Massive data centers are planned on vast tracts of land here and in other countries where they will drain fresh water reserves to cool the acres of machines that feed information. They will need to generate more electricity, letting the locals pay the bills and try to irrigate their food crops with no water. This, understandably, has caused widespread resistance from across the political spectrum.

What matters is who is using it.

AI is being used for good and bad. The bad: using AI to find bombing targets in Iran and Gaza, to throw people off of healthcare rolls, to track immigrants for ICE, and to promote ethnic violence with fake images posted on the internet. The good: it is being used to further medical research and develop vaccines, to tackle complex questions about climate change, and to restore Indigenous languages before they are lost forever. The good comes from communities of people using AI to solve problems important to them and the society where they work and live.

The bad and deadly uses are linked to a mad scramble by a half dozen billionaires who think they know best what is good for us and who want to be the first to get their product on the market and increase their power, no matter the disastrous side effects. This is yet another example of why we should not have billionaires and how important decisions about our lives have been taken out of our hands.

More to come: the resistance in our state.