First of all, this essay is researched and argued. There are many sources accross the texts.

Landgon Winner wrote an essay

• the technology is designed to have certain political effects
• the technology is inherently political

Technologies and machines tend to profeit. For example, the mechanical tomato harvester by UC Davis in the 1950s.

Once the tech­nology arrives and becomes entrenched, the conver­sa­tion gets reframed as one of tech­no­log­ical inevitabilism vs. anachro­nism, and dissent is discour­aged. [...] The adaptation of social life to technical requiremetns pop up spontaneously.

Liberal democracy is sustainable as long as "the balance of power of democracy is premised on the average person having leverage through creating economic value. If that's not present, I think things become kind of scary."

In prac­tice, certain people in a capi­talist liberal democ­racy tend to get increas­ingly rich. Absent coun­ter­mea­sures, the wealthy gain control of the polit­ical appa­ratus, thwarting liberal-demo­c­ratic norms.

The synthesis might be: as more wealth becomes concen­trated in the hands of fewer citi­zens, liberal democ­racy weakens, because whichever citi­zens are losing economic rele­vance will also lose polit­ical rele­vance.

The AI story is a fallacy: the sci-fi discourse is optimized for cinematic impact instead of real daily life changes.
Moreover the paperclip maximizer experiment of Nick Bostrom shows AI has unintended side-effects.

The West was won by AI because we balance water supply between the population and AI. Water is a biolog­ical neces­sity; AI is not.

Another point is laber replacement. Every CEO is outdoing the next in predicting that AI will replace human labor, which will lead to waves of unemployment.

Capital markets are laready pricing as if AI companies will have the perfect scenarios.
Software programmers, highly paid writers and lawyers are all work with high costs that can be automated.

Zitron has char­ac­ter­ized the AI market so far as a blink­ered conver­sa­tion between AI exec­u­tives and trad exec­u­tives, all of whom “have little idea what work looks like”.

Many CEOs and billionaires argued AI will create an abundance of goods and services. Really?

The persis­tent lack of detail signals that these billion­aires have no idea how, exactly, AI will accom­plish this.

Even if the labor comes down to 0$, resources, enegery and raw materials have a cost. Another contradiction is "Big AI’s promises of world-histor­ical goodies for consumers and world-histor­ical profits for share­holders may be incom­pat­ible".

To improve public acceptance, AI has so far emphasized their fun consumer-facing porducts: generating an image or writing a story. In the goodies economy, as citi­zens lose inde­pen­dence as economic actors, they will also lose inde­pen­dence as polit­ical actors. They will be captured by industry.

Tangible assets are the oppo­site—bricks, mortar, inven­tory, and so forth. According to the WIPO, since 1995 global invest­ment in intan­gible assets has steadily increased, and since 2009 has exceeded that of tangible assets. By wide margin, the US leads invest­ment in intan­gible assets.

If you think about it, it's crazy. It's even more crazy to see the productivity growth compared to the hourly compensation growth: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/#:~:text=Figure%202

“Tech­nology always makes certain jobs obso­lete; new ones will arise.” AI’s predicted labor replace­ment is unprece­dented in three ways: the diver­sity of tasks replaced; its outsize effect on highly educated workers; and the back­drop of 50 years of wage stag­na­tion.

If an AI can replace the output of a company, then every company with an AI can do so.

Currently certain legal-AI star­tups license LLMs from Big AI and repackage them for Big Law at high prices. These star­tups claim to add other special sauce. OK, sure. Where’s the economic equi­lib­rium? If legal-AI star­tups prove that money can be made selling AI to Big Law—won’t Big AI just sell to Big Law directly, and cut out the star­tups?

By the process described above: Big AI essen­tially uses its tech customers as an R&D facility.

As AI makes it harder for workers to capture value from their labor, they will increas­ingly have to rely on goodies from Big AI, priva­tizing what were once func­tions of govern­ment. If Big AI subsumes the func­tions of workers and govern­ment, both will tend to realign polit­i­cally around Big AI’s inter­ests. [...] AI-centered capi­talism risks an extinc­tion of demo­c­ratic possi­bility

Epilogue