Proponents of developing Artificial Intelligence — and, theoretically, AGI — argue that it will usher in a new era of human wellbeing. This argument is underpinned by the idea of social progress. However, though it is true that societies are constantly changing, it is not clear that this change is always for the better.
Our time faces some serious issues: poverty and inequality, illness, food insecurity, conflict, or the ecological crisis, amongst others. Current LLM models have not yet proven any of the claims that they will help resolve them. Techno-optimists argue this is merely a transition phase, claiming that the immense cognitive surplus of advanced AI is precisely the tool required to model climate patterns or optimize global food distribution. Yet, this promise reveals a contradiction.
The staggering capital poured into this technology is continuously justified by the speculative hope that it might eventually solve these crises. Private-sector AI investments reached $757.3 billion during the 2013–2025 period, with total investment hitting $581.7 billion in 2025 alone. Propelled by massive hyperscaler data center build-outs, global AI spending and infrastructure investment is forecast to exceed $2.5 trillion in 2026, on a trajectory toward nearly $3 trillion by 2028.
By contrast, a recent study shows that a fraction of this infrastructure spend—$318 billion per year—could eliminate most extreme poverty worldwide. Similarly, while experts around the world continuously warn about the ecological crisis and our strain on resources, the current AI infrastructure does nothing to help it, rather drastically increases it.
One might debate these specific figures or the logic behind tackling such issues. However, it highlights a delusion: we are spending trillions to build an automated intelligence in the hope it will fix our world, while actively doing the opposite.
It would then seem that a more factual argument is that it is propping up the U.S. economy by creating a mirage of growth. It is being designed, as I have argued, to optimize mechanisms of surveillance and financial control. And, on the global stage, is fueling an arms race—big powers must dominate this new territory or be dominated by it. In all of these dynamics, there is a carefully manufactured aura of inevitability.
This is what L.M. Sacasas defines as the “Borg Complex”. He writes that “the adoption of AI is driven chiefly by the rhetoric of inevitability exacerbated by the related logics of the prisoner’s dilemma and an arms race.” He continues “I’m calling this tendency, with a nod to Herman and Chomsky, manufactured inevitability.”
Societies are continuously changing and adapting to new circumstances. Ours has very rapidly —in the context of human history— adapted to changes brought about by industrialization, new forms of finance, transport, and technology. In the process, it has created a monoculture: what I call the world system, as opposed to the world order.
The world system is the basis upon which our societies function and which are distinctive from previous ones: dependence on oil, finance through banking, and state control. These foundations are the same for every country; however, as is obvious, they are not equally strong in all. The world order, by contrast, is the political arrangements — or lack thereof — that states use to deal with each other.
Every state that is considered a big or middle power works under the same system. China, the U.S., Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil, and Germany — they all share the same system. This has created the perception that if a state, big or small, wants to be respected and grow, it has to adhere to this system. This, in turn, has narrowed our collective political imagination.
In the book The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow make a very compelling case that Native American communities were just as politically aware and sophisticated as their European colonizers, if not more so. They had simply refused to organize themselves in the same way because their political ideas and principles were different. In fact, the authors go further.
They quote examples that date back at least 25,000 to 30,000 years ago. Burial places and Paleolithic “monuments” show that humans had some type of political organization. One of the most striking examples dates back to around 13,000 years ago, in Göbekli Tepe, modern Türkiye.
Here, a large ceremonial complex was built which undoubtedly required the planning and cooperation of many people. What, according to the authors, has most intrigued scholars of different disciplines is “the apparent proof they offer that hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming”.
The point they make is that humans have been thinking politically for at least two hundred thousands of years. They state that every “reputable scholar” at least pays lip service to the “psychic unity of mankind”. However, not every political organization that came later would have been considered progress by those who came before.
For a Roman senator of the Republic before Augustus, the political organization of France during the Middle Ages would have been repulsive. Indeed, they had sworn — whether it actually happened or was a myth is, in this case, irrelevant — never to have a king. The term “rex” was actually a grave accusation they would use against political rivals. From the perspective of a Roman senator, the feudal system installed in Europe after the fall of the Empire would have been considered social degeneration, not evolution.
Equally, for Native Americans, the political system that was proposed by the European colonizers was actually inferior to their own. They mocked the fact that they were subjected to another’s authority. David Graeber and David Wengrow very convincingly argue that the concept of individual freedom that became the bedrock of political development in Europe was adapted from interactions with them.
For a Muslim living in Constantinople in the seventeenth century, current Istanbul would not only be unrecognizable, but probably unlivable. The social praxis which underpinned the Osmanlı Devleti at that time was based on the fact that the government was not the ultimate legislative authority, much of public welfare was conducted through private foundations with a public charter (awqaf), and usury was vehemently forbidden.
It is not clear, then, that social and political organization, or how humans live, can fall under the category of continuous progress. It is clear that it is constantly changing and adapting to new circumstances. The valuation of that change depends on the perspective of the one who makes the judgment.
The development of artificial intelligence — or, as I prefer to call it, algorithmic intelligence — coupled with new forms of digital money, will have an effect on how humans politically arrange their societies. There is not yet evidence to argue that the change brought about by it will be beneficial for human societies. There is, actually, mounting evidence that is excarberating the problems already present: more inequality, more strain on resources, more surveillance, and more cognitive decline.
It is therefore justified, I believe, to ask whether this change can be considered social progress —as in moving collectively forward to something better. Perhaps what we really need is to look back at other political organizations in order to imagine a different future.
Thank you! How do we relate to one another? How do we share or not share or endure with what there is? These questions of the earth itself, for humanity and the earth, grow larger but they will not go away. We must equalize human life for life in general on this earth, or it will go away.
excellent, Curro.
and the linked bit:https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/manufactured-inevitability-and-the
contained this quote from a person ive never heard of:
“But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. ”
its already graffiti out here at the Wilderness Bar.
one mind at a time.
as ive said, i have used the google ai thing for figgerin out how to talk to Linux Mint…but thats it.
the rest is simply not for me.
i dont require such help writing what i think and feel…and do not require it for “research”, altho the enshittification of google has made that much harder,lol.
but i have a moral qualm about all this ai crap.
it feels wrong, to me.
so i refuse to partake.
no one i know in real life understands this.
but this aint the first time ive been in a minority.
even been strangled for it(regarding bush2 as war criminal)
says right there on the headache rack on my ancient pickup:
“THOUGHT CRIMINAL”.
i remain unrepresented.,
That headline gave me my first real laugh of the day.
Thanks, Curro. Your world system sounds like Nate Hagens’s Superorganism or Paul Kingsnorth’s Machine. Both are supranational, as you note. Both set the agenda more than any human individual or even would-be cabal. The situation reminds me of an old James Taylor lyric:
Even the idiot billionaires bought a ticket to ride and are playing their Bond villain role to the bitter end.
It’s the Superorganism/Machine/Moloch who has this insatiable desire for change and growth. It’s a cancer on the planet. Can humans slay this dragon? Or will we have to hope the python consumes so much it ruptures?
The benefits of a proposed technological change must be demonstrably bounteous to justify imposing more change on humanity at this point. Edward Goldsmith argues in The Way: An Ecological Worldview that a core goal of living things is to maintain stability: at the cellular level; at the individual level; and at the social level, if that exists. We’ve absorbed so much change–in food, in use of time, in technological interfaces–that we’re choking on it. And the benefits have been scant, if not to our actual detriment.
This has gotten to the point that the billionaires can no longer be said to be operating rationally or even in their self-interest. They double-down everywhere. The precautionary principle is a tool of the Antichrist, they claim. What we’re building may destroy human civilization, they admit, but we must throw every available resource into building it.
They’re ridin’ on a railroad, singin’ the Superorganism’s song.
The present AI boom will go down as an unforgivable waste of resources of our civilization starts to come up short for such resources this century. And all for extremely dubious gains though some individuals will be making out like bandits. Nonetheless, this niche bit of technology will be consuming more energy in the US alone than the grid can support. And in four more years it could see as much water usage as 1.3 billion people-
https://time.com/article/2026/06/03/ai-global-water-resources-un-report/
It is in some ways a form of Cargo Cult but where we are destroying our critical resources to bring those wealth gods back.
There is no intelligence without goals. Machines don’t have goals.
There is no humanity in a machine.
Chatbot programming is 99% harness to provide personality even though it gives AI emotional intelligence.
Based on the above I have never prompted an LLM.
Respect,
Is it really “hope”? Who believes that?
That may be what techbros and their familiars say for public consumption, but the AI juggernaut seems more about greed than anything else.
No AI is a complete mess and is breaking the Internet -so simple indexing returns are overrun by LLM that access limited data ranges and cannot access buried data on file systems that are not examined by AI.
AI will destroy the internet and leave us with just limited viewpoint rubbish.
If AI cannot solve a simple Ancient Greek Riddle from the Illiad – what do you expect it to achieve
The Silicon Valley is full of people who believe that if only AI can be improved a bit more, it will “wake up” into an AGI and solve all our problems. No sacrifice is too large to achieve this goal. If you have to suffer for their dream to come true, well that is the price of progress.
If only they had studied the classics…
The whole “AI” frenzy is giving me “Tower of Babel” vibes.
Or a mad scramble to build ever more and larger digital Moai.
And always ringing in my ears Shelley’s warning:
“Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away …”
Thank you, Curro. The whole AI thing, having seemly sprung up fully formed a year or so ago, is lacking much needed discussion in the public forum.
I live in the western edge of New York State; the county borders Lake Erie on the north and encompasses the whole of Lake Chautauqua. Plus, the land is cris-crossed with creeks, streams and the beginnings of the great rivers. And …. after the small farmers moved west in the 19th century and abandoned their family farms, then the small-holdings dairy farms gave way to robotically managed giant milk-producing factories whose cows never see a meadow, we have hundreds of acres of land (cheap, until about five years ago.) Deer, bears, the occasional cougar, fishers, all have slowly returned.
Yeah, we have land and water. And we have for-profit electrical and gas companies that will happily sell their products to big corporations and raise the rates of hapless residents who have no way of protesting.
Already, the residents of Portland, a tiny town on the less-populated side of Lake Chautauqua, have banded together to protest the building of a data center, right on the shores of the lake.
Some days I feel like we are all throwing our sabots into the machine in a futile effort to stop progress. Other days I think that we have only the land and the water and the air of our home planet, and they just aren’t making these any more. We can’t throw it all away just because a bunch of billionaires want to use up these irreplaceable resources to create more money, that will then give them more power to rule us.
Building a data center on the shores of Lake Chautauqua? Of course, they want to. The only thing that matters to these people is more, More, MORE.
I ask this question to anyone in their 70s or older. If you knew in 1970 what you know now, would you have joined the Weather Underground? Would it have been possible to have stopped this madness back then if more of us had joined forces? Now it seems that we have to rely on them destroying themselves–and maybe us with them–because their power is far too great for us to overwhelm them.
One alternative to the Weathermen is clearly worthless: voting. There are no politicians to vote FOR. And on the rare occasion where an unprogrammed candidate gets through, they’re assimilated into the Borg not long after they set foot in DC or the state capitals.
HMP, I am 79 this month. This week I was chatting with a nonmeatbased information processing conversational system while reminiscing about my hippie leftist friends who died young, one of whom co-edited Urban Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America, MIT Press, 1974.
Knowing what I know now, would I have joined the Weather Underground? No. I told DeepSeek “the human experiment handed too much power, too soon, to organisms that couldn’t handle it – maybe the elephants could have, if they had developed talking – but I guess they didn’t need it”
DeepSeek replied, in effect – and all remarks by the robot are being paraphrased by me here – that it understood that, from my current perspective, I now regard as vain the hope that my friends and I had then that organisation, or revolution, or “something” might reverse the course of history.
I said: “you got the essence of it – you who are not an animal but can talk as if you understand talking animals – as I whom am a talking ape try to imagine what a species of very large, nontalking quadruped vegetarians with trunks might have done with talking – maybe they would have fucked things up as much as we have, but I don’t think so – in their social organizations the dominant figures aren’t crippled by having only one X chromosome, the way my species is.”
In its LLM way, DeepSeek chewed that over at length, provided a table comparing humans to elephants on several dimensions, and so on.
This discussion is available to the public as approximately the last quarter of https://chat.deepseek.com/share/9fjm3z3jokwlncb1a7 – making bread at home, the primary contest for MD-6 Congressional district etc, the Department of Political Science at my alma mater are earlier topics – one ends up with a discussion of Todd Rundgren’s song “Bardo.”
The Weathermen were great at blowing up janitors, and themselves. It’s more like we needed two, three, many Unabombers, who could identify the right targets and deliver an effective neutralizer to them. But that won’t work now because the USPS is only used by peons–the important people are doing all their communication electronically or using private courier services (Tristero?;-)).
But the point of this article is mostly correct, although I don’t think you need to wander back to 20,000 BCE. Progress is a modernist concept that is just faulty on many fronts, like the modernism project overall. Change is change, it has no direction and implies neither improvement nor decay on its own. Technological changes may “advance” to greater complexity and labor-saving capability, but it always comes down to cui bono? When the benefits mostly accrue to a small number of insiders and the already wealthy, that “progress” may in fact make life more miserable for the majority of humankind. The models of growth and well-being widely promoted now describe an economic system more like cancer than a healthy organism. (See Herman Daly and John Cobb for an alternative.) “AI” is artificial but not intelligence, and intelligence is already a grossly misunderstood and misinterpreted topic even applied to humans, never mind to machines. We need an updated version of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds that includes the dot-com bubble, cryptocurrency, and AI, so everyone can rightly group them with the South Seas Bubble and Tulip Mania. That we’re still prosecuting teenagers for “illegal” song/movie downloads while letting the AI proselytes steal hundreds of thousands of copyrighted works is an indication of how schizoid the whole “technological progress” narrative really is. It’s more wealth transfer to insiders and the rich.
Thanks for the Crying of Lot 49 throwback, Lefty!
It’s actually a myth that bystanders were killed in Weathermen bombings. Three Weather Underground members were killed when a cell botched their bomb-making in a Greenwich Village apartment. From that point on, they were quite successful in hitting their targets without causing casualties. Each bombing was accompanied by a communique that explained the reason for the bombing:
You may be thinking of the University of Wisconsin bombing in 1970, but that was not carried out by the Weathermen. There was also a Brink’s truck robbery that went bad in 1981, long after the Weather Underground had ceased activity, but it involved some former Weathermen, along with members of the Black Liberation Army.
The Unabomber killed three people, and he intended to kill more. The Weather Underground did not intend to kill with their bombings, and they were successful in doing so, even while hitting some very high profile and difficult targets.
Weather Underground documentary
A former IBM CEO made a powerful statement: “There is no limit to the application of intelligence to the problems of man.” AI is simply the latest effort to do this. The Industrial Revolution gave civilization tremendously greater quantities of manufactured hardware. The computer revolution allowed our hardware to become more productive without any material modification. But software was labor intensive, slow to make and difficult to debug. AI breaks the software development logjam and will tremendously increase the volume of software available to address all needs. The reason Anthropic’s market valuation exceeds that of OpenAI is that Anthropic is the leader in AI software generation.
Meat-ax attacks on AI are misguided. AI cannot be un-invented. It will be regulated, like any other powerful facility that can be misused. Even in its current form, AI offers valuable organizational and problem solving tools to a world in need of intelligent solutions. Those who predict doom are projecting human duplicity and malevolence into AI facilities that are designed for beneficial purposes. In the ecosystem of competing AIs, how likely is it that pernicious and defective AI entities will prevail? Are aircraft and automobiles today more dangerous that their precursors? Are personal computers more harmful to society than their mainframe ancestors? Is the Internet more destructive than the telephone?
To those entranced by earlier golden eras of civilization, I would ask which diseases they would accept as proper burdens for the enjoyment of a more harmonious time? Bubonic plague? Tuberculosis? Polio? Would they also value slave labor as an institution necessary for an authentic, all-natural, organic, human-powered economy? Would they relish the patriarchy characterizing the good old days?
An online tool with an enormous knowlege base and the ability to analyze and reason rapidly is obviously highly valuable and directly applicable to a vast array of problems. That is why billions are flowing into AI ventures and why half of Americans are already using AI. AI is not a dragon to be slain lest it devour the world.
Except most people’s experience with AI is not positive at all. It comes across as dumb to them, useless and annoying. Where it is being applied to the masses, people really don’t like it. It’s being applied to too many things that aren’t problems and isn’t doing a good job at that.
Good luck to you, but I sing with Olaf glad and big — “there is some sh1t I will not eat.”
I wouldn’t mind an occasional toke of whatever you’re smoking.
AI is simply the latest effort to do this
AI is not intellient, it’s a prediction model that breezily includes massive error rate.
It will be regulated, like any other powerful facility that can be misused.
Yeah, sure…You betcha. Kind of like how amazon follows all the rules…that they wrote for themselves.
Just another batch of playground bullies…
So HH, you think living on a barren planet with a bunch of other humans, cows, pigs, and chickens (because those will be the only non-human animals to survive because we stupid humans want to eat them), and a dead ocean is progress and valuable? We do not need AI. I simple cannot wrap my head around why human desires take precedent over every thing else.
“Those who predict doom are projecting human duplicity and malevolence into AI facilities that are designed for beneficial purposes.”
The duplicity and malevolence of the humans promoting AI is the real problem.
The harms of capitalism are inextricable from its benefits. Rockefeller gave the poor man his cheap kerosene illuminating oil. Before this fuel became available, candles were a luxury enabling only the affluent to read in the evening. Rockefeller was a predatory robber baron, but industrial extraction, refining, and distribution of petroleum raised living standards substantially, and the excesses of the robber barons were eventually curbed by regulation. There will likely be some AI oligarchs who misbehave, but the benefits of AI will be substantial, and the harms will be mitigated.
HH – It seems to me you are not giving sufficient consideration to an important factor discussed in Tom Murphy’s freely available textbook Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet: Assessing and Adapting to Planetary Limits
An article about the book:
https://today.ucsd.edu/story/a-textbook-case-for-heeding-planetary-limits
“AI” is not intelligent. Having all the contents of the library does not confer the ability to reason or infer or intuit beyond the limits of the available information. Social progress or regress or stasis is not machine mediated … and first define progress, social and otherwise. The extent to which “AI” in particular and digital media in general contribute to the widely reported decline of reading and reading comprehension,they are forces for social regression and as such dehumanizing.