Tag: ai

Harvard Professor Warns That AI Execs Are Pushing World Toward Factory Farming of Humans

We’re racing towards a future where AI enables the “factory farming of humans,” a Harvard professor warns — if tech elites get their way, at least.

In a new episode of The New York Time’s “Hard Fork” podcast, the historian Jill Lepore discusses her idea of an “artificial state” that’s supplanting the traditional nation state, and particular constitutional democracy, with one that erases human autonomy.

In this emerging world order, government is conducted “not by the consent of people but by machines that are making decisions,” she explained on the podcast. And those machines, of course, are owned by corporations.

We aren’t living in the artificial state quite yet, Lepore stresses, but it’s something that’s being built and realized around us. And crucially, it’s also a fantasy held by certain influential elites who believe their power should supersede the actual government and the voters who decide how it’s run.

“The rhetoric that comes out of this particular historical moment is really about the evanescence of modern liberal democracy, constitutional democracy,” she said. The elites pushing this rhetoric aren’t “interested in what the people want,” she added. “Because actually, what the people want is not to have AI and not to have data centers. So that’s the crisis.”

Lepore explores the idea in depth in her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She was inspired by a simple question: in our current world where you’re forced to talk to an AI to get answers, ranging from when you call in to ask about an appointment or talk to a company’s support chatbot on its website, “who decided this is a way we should be living?”

The artificial state is a sort of backsliding, in which more and more of the state’s functions are now being replaced by corporations that own and control our digital communications infrastructure. How we get our news, and information on elections and who to vote for, is all being mediated by these powerful groups — through technologies like the TV and radio, once, and now social media being the increasingly dominant medium.

The digital communication our lives are now structured around have a powerful isolating effect. In her 2024 piece for The New Yorker where she initially explored the idea that would later become her book, Lepore described the artificial state as the “factory farming of public life, the sorting and segmenting, the isolation and alienation, the destruction of human community.” 

The artificial state isn’t purely driven by AI, but it’s certainly being accelerated by it. People are asking ChatGPT about who to vote for, rather than talking to their neighbors, local officials, or experts. The political messages they’re seeing, meanwhile, are probably in part being written with AI. Decisions at every level are being made with the assistance of thinking machines. AI is also entrenching surveillance, processing the mountains of data that is being gathered on all of us.

One nefarious aspect of the pro-AI rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley is that it frames AI as an inevitability. But Lepore argued that this brand of fatalism is a “bogus premise,” itself nestled on top of several more dubious propositions. One we hear endlessly is that regulation stifles innovation, so the government should take the handbrake off AI development. The other is that technology always advances democracy, which assures us that all of the very real threats to democracy AI poses in the present will magically sort themselves out.

Neither of those are true, Lepore says, and you have to look no further than how similar promises were made for technologies in the recent past. 

“So now, the AI people come back with the same argument that was made about the internet — the personal computer, the internet, and social media,” she said in the interview.

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The UN and Red Cross Are Calling for Restrictions on AI Drones and Killer Robots

The United Nations and the Red Cross are warning that rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic weapons are bringing the world dangerously close to crossing a moral red line that has inspired dystopian science fiction for decades: the autonomous targeting of humans by deadly machines.

In an appeal to world leaders on August 25, the International Committee of the Red Cross and UN Secretary-General António Guterres renewed their call for a global treaty establishing restrictions on autonomous weapons systems. They warned that the technology behind AI targeting software and unpiloted drones has developed at record speed since the UN and Red Cross first called for such negotiations three years ago.

“At the same time, scientists and engineers developing these systems have themselves raised the alarm,” Guterres and the Red Cross said in a joint statement on August 25. “When the architects of this technology are calling for limits, States cannot afford to remain passive. This year must mark a turning point.”

In other words, the world must act now to rein in what are commonly known as “killer robots” or “slaughterbots” — unpiloted drones, robotic dogs, robot sentries armed with guns, AI targeting systems, and other digitally driven death machines that can identify, strike, and eliminate human beings on their own.

“You don’t even need drone operators; you can just type in a coordinate and not see the implications of what you are doing,” said Rory Fanning, an author, activist, and veteran of the U.S. war on Afghanistan, in an interview.

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Sanders Vows to Introduce Legislation to Stop Flock’s “AI Mass Surveillance”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has pledged to introduce legislation aimed at reining in the mass adoption of AI-powered video surveillance via companies like Flock Safety, as the camera networks being erected in communities across the U.S. face fierce backlash.

Sanders said that the widespread adoption of AI-powered Flock cameras that monitor peoples’ every activity outside of their homes is edging the U.S. closer to a system of totalitarianism. The company says that its cameras are already in place in over 6,000 communities across the U.S.

“You may not know it, but you may already be being tracked by artificial intelligence,” Sanders wrote on Monday. “Flock, a surveillance company backed by Big Tech oligarchs like Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, has installed more than 120,000 AI-powered surveillance cameras across America.”

“What does that mean for you? It means that if Flock is in your community, every time you leave your house, a Flock camera records and tracks you,” Sanders went on. “If you are dropping your kids off at school, Flock knows. If you are going to a doctor, Flock knows. If you are going out on a date, Flock knows.”

Sanders said that he is soon introducing legislation to “stop Flock and AI mass surveillance.”

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Paxton “Child Safety” Plan Puts Legal Speech at Criminal Risk

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for the US Senate, and pushing online digital ID age verification checks in the name of “online safety,” has announced a data center plan that, among other things, vows to “protect children” by making data center companies criminally liable if the centers they operate “empower AI chatbots that undermine children’s safety.”

Paxton is effectively promising to author legislation that would introduce a novel form of liability, aimed at data centers – the physical and hardware part of the internet’s infrastructure – for the content that is generated by software running on their servers.

This is a clear departure from the principle, enshrined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), that internet infrastructure is not liable for third-party, user-generated content.

And, while Paxton’s plan speaks of chatbots that “undermine children’s safety” – a broad and vague term that can easily be abused to censor speech – the actual target could be any chatbot, and any speech.

And the liability would be criminal.

Paxton is quoted as saying in a post on X: “My Texas First Data Center Plan will protect our grid, our communities, and our children while ensuring America beats Communist China in the AI race,” he wrote.

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Undersecretary of War Says Whoever Wins AI Race Will Dominate Economically, Militarily

Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said Tuesday at Breitbart News’s latest policy event that whoever wins the AI Race, the United States or China, will dominate economically and militarily.

During Breitbart News’s “AI is Here: What to Fear, What to Embrace,” Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle asked Michael what would happen if the United States loses the AI race to China, and what the stakes would be for Western civilization as a whole. Michael said that whoever emerges as the victor in the AI race will lead economically.

“If you think about the 20th century, the way I’ve described this is we had military power leading up through World War II, and that created sort of… peace besides the Cold War, and then that led to our technological dominance. The internet started here. The internet economy started here. The iPhone, the app economy started here, and… that led to our sort of economic dominance… military technology economy,” he said. “Now, in the 21st century, I think technological dominance will determine whether we are economically dominant and militarily dominant. It stems from the tech dominance.” 

“If AI is the central, newest, and most important new technology, if we’re not dominant in that, it threatens our military and economic dominance, and it’s just a different flow in the 21st century,” he added. “And whoever wins that technological race, I think, is going to be [sic] economically, and that means the dollar is the reserve currency. That means priceable are priced in dollars. That means American bonds are the kind of thing that people invest in for safety. That means we have much more control of the financial system and… can ensure that it’s used for good.”

“So I think,” Michael asked, “do you want the Chinese model or the American model in the 21st century? And that starts for who’s going to be dominant in technology.”

Taylor Budowich, the founder of Innovation Council Action Inc. and former White House deputy chief of staff, told Boyle in an earlier conversation at the event that allowing China to win the AI race is “not an option.”

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Tech Evangelist Bill Gates Suddenly Argues AI Needs to Slow Down to Protect Humanity

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and leftist billionaire who has spent years predicting that AI would free people from drudgery and speed cures for disease and climate change, published an essay Wednesday warning that without urgent government intervention, AI could cause more harm than good.

Bill Gates, who transformed himself from a software tycoon into a leftist icon of environmentalism and health philanthropy,  has now published an essay calling for an AI slowdown. This is a massive shift is a shift for a tech evangelist who has built his post-Microsoft career on faith in AI’s ability to fix hard problems. Gates said this is the first time in his life he wishes a new technology would advance more slowly.

“I’m surprised to feel this way,” Gates said. “I’ve never seen a problem that innovation can’t solve.”

Gates grouped his worries into three categories: safety threats such as AI-enabled hacking, biological weapons and fraud; job losses driven by AI and AI-powered robots; and risks to children, including stunted learning and damaged human relationships. Writing software code and enabling new kinds of cyberattacks are the two areas where he says AI has recently outpaced his own expectations. Asked about the latter, he used one word: “mind-blowing.”

Gates argued the AI industry cannot police itself and called on the U.S. government to take the lead in regulating it. He wants broad national and international frameworks to address AI’s risks to security, safety, jobs and other areas, built around collaboration between elected officials, subject-matter experts and ordinary citizens. The idea echoes a proposal from AI leader Demis Hassabis, who has called for international AI safety standards overseen by an expert body.

“My basic view is nobody’s shown up,” Gates said of the lack of government action so far. “So this is a shrill call, and I want this to be bipartisan.”

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Locals Have Every Right to Question Data Centers

Locals have every right to question data centers, Breitbart News social media director and Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI author Wynton Hall said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.

Hall spoke about the debate over data centers and pointed out that the vast majority of Americans are already using AI, even if they do not realize it, as it is “baked into the algorithms that power everything from our our streaming services to our GPS and the rest.”

He explained that there are about 4,000 data centers in America, with thousands more to come as America must beat China in the AI race. However, Hall said Big Tech’s messaging on this has been terrible at addressing the concerns of communities.

“As I say in Code Red, we we want to beat China without becoming China. You know, we don’t want to live in a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance state. But I’ve never seen worse messaging. I’ve been doing, you know, very high-level ghostwriting and speechwriting and every other kind of thing for, you know, almost two decades. I’ve never seen worse corporate communication than we’ve seen around this issue, and I think it is quite frankly sort of a disaster for the AI titans, the industry, and it’s causing a lot of panic, a lot of of concern, and I think we’ve got to get clarity around this right away,” Hall said, walking through some of the main reasons Americans do not want AI data centers in their backyards.

“The reason 71 percent of Americans don’t want an AI data center in their backyard is really, you know, their electric, the water, and the noise. I mean, there are other existential issues, but those are sort of the bigger slices of the pie. And the concern for people, particularly in water-constrained areas, is the amount of water that you know these data centers will consume now,” he said.

“Berkeley Labs is projecting that by 2028, U.S. data centers could directly consume you know roughly between, they say, between 38 to 73 billion gallons annually, and that sounds enormous. That is enormous, but I think the thing that’s missing is some context because you know most people say, well, 38 billion, you know, 73 billion gallons of water for data center cooling to cool these, you know, systems. But just to put that [into] a little perspective, you know, American golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water every day, right? So, so even at that high end, if you’re talking about the future data center estimate, you know, golf course irrigation is roughly seven times that,” he said, explaining that this does not mean it is not an important conversation. This means, for starters, that data centers are probably not ideal for water-restrained communities, but there are other solutions as well.

He talked about the “closed loop direct chip cooling with the zero water evaporation for cooling during operations that can radically reduce the water consumption,” noting that there have already been solutions for the thousands of data centers that already exist. However, there has been terrible communication from the Big Tech elite, allowing others to sow seeds of fear around this technology.

“You have a closed loop system that you want to be built, and it — and it’s almost like a radiator in a sense, right? You’re not constantly pumping new fresh water in; you’re circulating, but not all systems are closed loop. And so, look, local people have a right to be concerned about these things, and this arrogance that we’re getting from the the Big Tech elite, you know — ‘Listen, peasants. You know, we know what’s best for you. Shut up and mind your betters,’” is “absolutely wrong approach,” Hall said.

“We need to get into the room, have a good old-fashioned debate, determine which communities it will benefit, which ones it won’t, and everyday people should be able to have a say. It’s not unreasonable to want to make sure that, you know, my electric bill is not going up. My water is not going to get drained, and I’m not going to listen to a hum all night,” he said. “I think that’s a very reasonable concern, and so I don’t think it has to be this zero-sum game.”

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Gov. Abbott: AI Data Centers ‘Dug Their Own Grave’

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned the booming artificial intelligence industry that data center developers have only themselves to blame for mounting voter backlash, saying they “dug their own grave” by failing to secure the support of local communities.

Abbott, a Republican who once hailed Texas as the “epicenter of AI development,” has taken an increasingly tough approach toward the industry as Texans raise concerns about soaring electricity demand, water use and infrastructure costs.

“Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential,” Abbott told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them,” he continued. “And that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

Abbott’s warning marks a notable turn from last November, when he joined Google to announce a $40 billion investment in three Texas data center campuses.

But as projects have multiplied, Abbott has moved to make developers shoulder more of the costs.

In June, he directed state regulators to require data centers to pay the full cost of the electrical infrastructure they require and called for phasing out tax incentives for the industry.

Earlier this month, Abbott ordered regulators to audit data centers seeking to connect to the Texas power grid before allowing projects to move forward.

He also told “Fox News Sunday” last week that fewer than 10% of data center companies responded to a state request for information officials need to forecast future electricity demand.

Abbott’s approach has drawn criticism from President Donald Trump, who has argued that Texas should embrace the industry as America races to maintain its technological edge.

“For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake,” Trump said, adding the industry “could be bigger than oil.”

The growing resistance to artificial intelligence computing centers is not limited to Texas.

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Congress is drowning in AI slop after staffers let unelected ChatGPT play lawmaker…

Leave it to Washington to discover a technology designed to make work easier and use it to create twice as much work.

Welcome to the Swamp.

Apparently, congressional staffers have discovered ChatGPT and Claude, and some are using AI to crank out actual legislative language. You know, the stuff that eventually becomes federal law and governs hundreds of millions of Americans.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot, apparently…

Look, if AI is used correctly, it can be a really helpful organizational tool and can help us lowly humans spot things we might overlook. But there’s an art to using it the right way.

AI should work with you, not replace a functioning human brain.

But it seems that little distinction hasn’t reached the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill.

Taxpayers are now paying congressional staffers to type a few prompts into ChatGPT, copy whatever it spits out, and then wander off for an 80-dollar lunch while somebody tries to make heads or tails out of the AI slop that’s supposed to be “federal law.”

And according to Politico, it’s becoming a huge, messy problem.

The House Office of Legislative Counsel is one of Congress’ quality-control departments. The lawyers take policy ideas and turn them into legislative language that is supposed to work inside the convoluted maze of existing federal law.

But now, those lawyers are getting hammered with AI-generated proposals that look finished on the surface, but when you dig deeper, they’re a total AI slop fest.

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Police officer arrested after using Flock cameras 717 times to track ex-wife

A police officer faces two criminal charges after being accused of using Flock cameras to track his estranged ex-wife over 700 times while on and off duty.

Christopher Goodson, an officer in Haines City in central Florida, was found to have looked up his ex-wife’s license plate number in the Flock database 717 times between Sept. 1, 2024, and June 30, 2026, according to an affidavit. Goodson told a supervisor he had looked up his ex-wife’s car to keep track of his children’s location.

Goodson has been charged with one count of offenses against users of computers and electronic devices, and one count of official misconduct, according to a Haines City Police Department news release.

The officer has indicated that he plans to resign due to the investigation, according to police.

Goodson’s arrest is part of a growing number of documented abuses of the Flock camera surveillance system by police.

A man in North Manchester, Indiana, who has repeatedly criticized his local government and the police at town council meetings, told the press that he noticed he was being frequently followed by police. “It started to be more than a coincidence; it kept happening more and more,” Bob Sklar told WWSB. “I didn’t understand why.”

He then realized that Flock cameras were being used to track him. Sklar said he is not aware of any legitimate reason he is being tracked.

Currently, there are over 116,000 such surveillance cameras, placed mostly at intersections in urban and suburban neighborhoods.   

Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, supervisor Andy Parrish is fighting Flock camera surveillance locally and nationally through his online campaigns. 

“People are being hurt. There are young women whose lives have been changed forever,” Parrish told LifeSiteNews. “We’ve got 80 women stalked and terrorized.”

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