Billionaire Bilious
First, conceptualise what is meant by ‘billion’ in talk of ‘billionaires’ and ‘a billion dollars’, and do it by thinking about time, thus: a million seconds is 2 weeks; a billion seconds is 32 years. Staggering.
Second, consider the fact that billionaires are running things - money and power are the same thing, and the influence of billionaires on US and Russian politics and government is huge. And contemplate the fact that just such a money-power nexus is the historical norm; most of history is about the money-power Few running things, the Many in direct and indirect servitude to their interests. In the period between the 17th and 20th centuries this norm was disrupted by the increasing democratisation of wealth as a result of the rising activity of merchants and the bourgeoisie - the middle classes of their time - which in turn was a factor in the consequent democratisation of politics. Any form of democracy is inconvenient to those who wish to be untrammelled in their exercise of power, so Big Money has always found its way round the constraints imposed by democracy’s interest in the rule of law and civil liberties for all. As we now see, those work-arounds have been so successful that the money-power Few have now got things back to the historical norm of their being above the law (because they buy the law) and alone free to do and be as they wish.
Or: almost. All is not yet lost. We can fight back. It looks tough at the moment; but reflection on the physical and moral struggles of the Many to redistribute both wealth and power away from Absolutists shows that it can be done: ‘ab esse ad posse’ as the trope has it. All it takes is courage, resolve, and persistence.
AI being controlled by the billionaires and AI having the potential not just to mirror inequalities in society but to exaggerate them is what most concerns me.
I recently did the excellent AI and ethics course at LSE. I feel many people don’t understand the extent of those risks.
Whether democracy is undermined or holds firm seems to me to be linked to who controls such machines.
And whether enough people who have integrity and care about democracy will ever have the power to decide what they should be allowed to do and how.
AI per se isn’t the problem, rather it is the fact that most of the companies and individuals with power to programme the LLMs etc and decide what systems are to be followed only care about making money, they are not interested in putting any brakes on, and some also seem to actively want to make more people poorer and less powerful
We can either despair or fight against these people who hold a nations resources by theft because all property is just that.(Proudhon).
To amass a billion others have to lose it. Individuals or States.
Political power is much the same. We gain at the cost of others. So we become conditioned to loss, death and destruction. Whilst others gain from it. We can accept that or fight. Your choice.