Thursday, August 27, 2026
PMT: The Simple Dangers of AI
I've written elsewhere about the threat AI poses to culture and human dignity. But there is a simpler danger, and one that only the government can address.
Once AI becomes relatively autonomous-- something happening right now-- it gains the power to destroy what it has access to. And what it has access to is data, system controls, and communications-- the things at the very center of our economy. Recent events (AI agents breaking in to Hugging Face to steal tools, for example) tell us that we are already in the danger area. There will be real consequences and destruction as the machines become more sophisticated.
Bill Gates just came out of hiding (Epstein files, etc.) to flip flop on AI and warn of its dangers given the way things have played out. He's right-- but only after he made billions of dollars on AI. And that's the problem; we are counting on the people making huge profits to be the ones to tamp down the money machine that is AI. How do you think that's going to work out?
The financial existential threat from AI is pretty basic. Companies want to maximize profits through efficiency. AI allows them to do that, because they can do the same work with far fewer human workers. Of course that's going to affect the economy and destroy employment! Defenders of AI say that those greater efficiencies will make the society as a whole richer, but never explain how those riches extend beyond those who profit directly from the efficiencies. In other words, the owners of the business get richer because they employ fewer people. The workers are fired. It's good for the owners and bad for the workers (er, ex-workers). Is that so hard to understand?
