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AI Is Not Here To Benefit Humanity. Just The Elites Who Are Behind It

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Have you ever watched the movie Dune or read the book? It’s a good analogy for how stories are created and how they can lead people astray from reality, and get them to believe in myths.

Briefly, Paul Atreides’s mother, a main character in the story, fabricates a story to position Paul as the rightful supreme leader, ultimately to control the population. Those who come across this myth don’t know any better and don’t realize it’s fabricated, and become true believers. This is similar to how many today don’t know the true history behind “Artificial Intelligence,” or what AI is or isn’t, so they fall for the nice stories crafted by a few very unremarkable, hubris-filled white males who believe only they are the rightful decision-makers for humanity’s future.

Similarly, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, like Paul, knows his story is a fabrication, yet they still get caught up in the created myth — power becomes intoxicating, insatiable, and the line between reality and science fiction blurs. The myth spreads as it’s repeated repeatedly to the masses who become true believers. This is essentially what is happening in Silicon Valley today and spreading throughout the world: a self-declared AI aristocracy built on a constructed myth becomes a new AI religion.

“Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.”

The above quote is attributed to Qi Lu. But Sam Altman, the high priest of the new AI religion, said this, “It got me thinking, though — the most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point, it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”

Therefore, when Altman and the rest of the Tech Bro AI aristocracy talk about AGI (artificial general intelligence) it is not based on any scientific evidence or discovery. It is simply a made up term, from a quasi-religious hypomania belief, of a tiny group of determined akward white men engaging in constructive delusion.

Religion is about power and control, so the new AI religion allows its high priests and acolytes to thrive off the ignorance of its followers. The intellectually lazy! And for Sam Altman and OpenAI, the aristocracy, this is their promised land. AI, too, is fundamentally about power and control for those who have a vision of what they want the world to look like, and with them at the top, enjoying the wealth of their manifestation.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has,” wrote Margaret Mead.

In her recent best-selling book, Empire of AI — Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, journalist and author Karen Hao explains how Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and a few others formed OpenAI with the “singular obsession: to be the first to reach artificial general intelligence, to make it in their own image.”

AI-generated videos are going viral after stereotypically depicting Black women.

OpenAI began under the “altruistic façade” of a “non-profit” by a small group of Silicon Valley elites determined to shape the future of AI and humanity with a very narrow view of the world and what it should be.

Similar to the Gilded Age period in America, from the late 1870s to the late 1890s, the “robber barons” of that time also believed that, because of their industrial achievements and ambitions about the future, they earned the right to make all the important economic decisions. The rest of society would benefit from their brillianceasthose benefits would “trickle down.” And lest we forget, former President Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economicsin the 1980s was the same idea.

So today, the Tech Bros — the few — believe that due to their self-declared superiority, they have the divine right to build the future how they see fit, and the benefits will “trickle down”.

Technologies are not inevitable; however, they progress when groups with capital and power decide it is worth pursuing and investing in. However, these technologies rarely advance and deliver widespread prosperity; instead, they come to benefit a narrow elite and serve their equally narrow agendas.

As an example, the invention of a new cotton gin in the 1790s transformed the American South’s plantation economy into the world’s largest exporter of cotton, significantly boosting the South’s economic growth and prosperity. This generated enormous economic gains for white landowners involved in the cotton industry, with enslaved Black people doing the work. But it never served the interests of the slaves; enslaved Black people were forced to work longer hours to extract maximum profit for rich plantation owners. Further intensifying the economy of slavery and the brutal dehumanization of Black bodies and minds, they didn’t want to give up the economic advantages technology created for them, so they would go as far as fighting a Civil War to keep their slave-plantation based economy. Which they build for themselves, nobody else!

Therefore, the promise of AGI utopia, technology that benefits entire societies as OpenAI says it will, is a lie! History tells us that things, more often than not, don’t materialize that way; usually, they only truly benefit a narrow elite. (Note, even the Second Industrial Revolution that occurred in Britain between 1870 to 1914, ushered in the rise of the new urban working poor concentrated in the city of London.)

Accordingly, the Silicon Valley AI Revolution is elite and agenda-driven; times and technologies might change, but human nature always stays the same. From the plantation owner elites of the South and even the feudal systems of the Middle Ages, human nature remains the same. Like the new cotton gin, new technology is typically developed to serve the economic interests of the elites. Regular folks, and the most vulnerable, seldom, if ever, truly benefit.

Colonialism 3.0

Today, it’s not about the theft of sugar, cotton, minerals and precious metals and other material natural resources, but the free extraction of massive water resources to run Google’s huge data centre in Chile, for example, or paying sweatshop wages to workers in Kenya for data inputs that feed these ever growing large language models for OpenAI.

The demand for land and water to power LLM energy needs is staggering to facilitate these supercomputers 24/7.

We must also acknowledge the theft of artists’ and writers’ work — OpenAI blatantly ignores copyright laws and fair compensation, along with the countless individuals sharing their experiences and data online that ChatGPT leverages to train these models on. We are, therefore, witnessing colonialism 3.0, under the new American AI empire, becoming the main exploiter and harmer of the planet, people and humanity.

Busting Myth

With all the hype surrounding AI, it might seem like a recent breakthrough in technology; however, the origins of what we call “AI” date back to 1950–1956, the period when Alan Turing published “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” which introduced a test for machine intelligence called The Imitation Game. You might have seen the movie.

In 1955, John McCarthy held a workshop at Dartmouth on “artificial intelligence,” marking the first use of the term. And in 1956, he coined the term to attract more attention and funding to his existing research. He explicitly stated years later, “I invented the term artificial intelligence to get money for a summer study.” Effectively, marketing and capital raising needs are behind the name AI, similarly to what is being done today with OpenAI and AGI.

So we still lack a definitive scientific consensus on what ‘artificial intelligence’ is, relative to authentic human general intelligence. Both AI and AGI remain undefined.

Consequently, when people refer to AI today, they are typically talking about a broad category of things they don’t fully understand. However, the term is catchy and seems reasonable enough, a suitable label for technologies that mimic various human behaviours or tasks, and if enough people use it over and over again, the uninformed and wilfully ignorant masses begin to adopt it, like a new religion.

Nevertheless, these systems operate very differently from how humans think, reason, and behave. Terms like machine learning, deep learning,and neural networks are also invented labels to support nice theories, but are void of any scientific bedrock to stand on, so a group of guys create a belief and call it whatever suits their agenda. This is the long and short of AGI.

So when AI advocates mention AGI, it is mostly a rebranding of AI. This is what major AI companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are doing: marketing and rebranding, because they all effectively produce the same thing, just different shades of pale grey.

Math Over Myths

Recently, Goldman Sachs published a 32-page report, June 25, 2024, GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT?In summary, it is clear that tech giants and beyond are set to spend over $ 1 trillion on AI capital expenditures in the coming years, with little to show for it so far.

Jim Covello, Head of Global Equity Research at Goldman Sachs, is highly skeptical, saying, “AI technology is exceptionally expensive, and to justify those costs, the technology must be able to solve complex problems, which it isn’t designed to do.” Arguing that “the technology isn’t designed to solve the complex problems that would justify the costs, which may not decline as many expect.”

Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT and 2024 Nobel Laureate, adds, “Given the focus and architecture of generative AI technology today… truly transformative changes won’t happen quickly and few — if any — will likely occur within the next 10 years.” Acemoglu goes on to say that AI might automate only 5% of tasks and add just 1% to global GDP over the next decade.

He says that AI’s potential is less clear than the Internet’s was, for example, and that human judgment trumps algorithms; he further challenges business leaders to innovate to enhance worker skills and productivity with AI, rather than seeing it as a one-dimensional cost-cutter or replacer of workers.

AI performs tasks we humans perform and recounts already established knowledge, he says. But reality is much more complex; it involves interactions and lots of other things based on tacit knowledge, or matching your contextual understanding of a problem with the specific tasks at hand. Most decisions require judgment, social interaction, and social intelligence, all of which are beyond the capabilities of AI.

“Many AI-based products use neural networks to infer patterns and rules from large volumes of data. But what many politicians do not understand is that simply adding a neural network to a problem does not automatically create a solution,” said the World Economic Forum (WEF), adding that “AI has huge potential — but it won’t solve all our problems, and not every problem is best addressed by applying machine intelligence.”

How long investors and people alike remain caught up in the myth and hype is anyone’s guess, but some bubbles just take longer to burst. But in the end, reality and gravity always prevail.

For those who read history, one thing has been proven over time: that our progress and prosperity depend on how we think and the choices we make about the technology we use.

Our choices matter! But if we allow others to be the arbiters of our lives, sacrificing our free will and individualism, we put our humanity at risk.

Technology has been a key driver of human progress and prosperity, which cannot be denied, but it can work against us when we allow all the major decisions to remain in the hands of a few hubris-filled men . Nevertheless, we do have agency, if we claim it with our minds, and don’t let nice stories, myths, and new religions run our lives.



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How TBM is evolving to power the AI era – cio.com

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How TBM is evolving to power the AI era  cio.com



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TED Radio Hour : NPR

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Illustration by Luke Medina/ NPR/Photo by Andrey Popov/ Getty Images

Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s goal is to not die at all.

A far-fetched idea, and yet those who have followed Kurzweil’s work over the decades know that many of his wild ideas and predictions come true.

Kurzweil was one of the first to forecast how AI would turbocharge human potential. His thought-provoking predictions about digital technology come from over six decades of experience inventing groundbreaking tools that we use today — tools like text to speech synthesis in 1976 and the first music synthesizer in 1983.

Now, 77, the computer scientist is focused on another prediction: that technology will soon make it possible to extend the human lifespan indefinitely.

Extending life through “longevity escape velocity”

“Right now you go through a year and you use up a year of your longevity,” Kurzweil explained in his 2024 TED Talk. “However, scientific progress is also progressing. … It’s giving us cures for diseases, new forms of treatment. … So you lose a year, you get back four months.”

As scientific progress accelerates, Kurzweil thinks the rate of developing treatments will outpace our aging. He calls this concept “longevity escape velocity.”

“For example, I’ve had these two problems, diabetes and heart disease, which I’ve actually overcome, and I really have no concern with them today,” Kurzweil told NPR’s Manoush Zomorodi. “So today I have an artificial pancreas that’s just like a real pancreas. It’s actually external, but it detects my glucose, determines the amount of insulin that I should have, and it works just like a real pancreas.”

With these types of medical advances, every year that someone gets older their health could deteriorate less and less.

“I don’t guarantee immortality. I’m talking about longevity escape velocity, where we can keep going without getting older. We won’t be aging in the same way that we are today,” said Kurzweil.

Is it only a matter of time before your mind merges with AI?

Along with his goal of escaping death, Kurzweil has envisioned a future where AI dramatically alters the way we think and live.

In 1999, in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that by 2029, artificial general intelligence would match and even exceed human intelligence. And while that may not seem so far-fetched anymore, Kurzweil says there’s one way his prediction is unique:

He claims our minds will merge with AI.

“We’re going to be able to think of things and we’re not going to be sure whether it came from our biological intelligence or our computational intelligence. It’s all going to be the same thing.”

Kurzweil calls this “the Singularity” and predicts a future where nanobots directly connect our brains to the cloud, expanding our intelligence.

“We will be funnier, sexier, smarter, more creative, free from biological limitations. We’ll be able to choose our appearance. We’ll be able to do things we can’t do today, like visualize objects in 11 dimensions … speak all languages,” Kurzweil said in his 2024 TED Talk. “We’ll be able to expand consciousness in ways we can barely imagine.”

As far as Kurzweil is concerned, our minds are already starting to merge with machines and will only continue to do so.

TED Radio Hour‘s special series: Prophets of Technology

Curious to learn more about Kurzweil’s predictions about AI and technology? On TED Radio Hour‘s three-part series, Prophets of Technology, host Manoush Zomorodi speaks with Ray Kurzweil and other scientists, entrepreneurs and experts predicting and shaping our tech future. They share what they’ve gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we’re headed next.

This episode is part one of TED Radio Hour’s three-part series: Prophets of Technology, conversations with the minds shaping our digital world. Part two will be available on Friday, July 18 and part three will be available on Friday, July 25.

This digital story was written by Harsha Nahata and edited by Katie Monteleone and Rachel Faulkner White.

This episode of TED Radio Hour was produced by James Delahoussaye and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and Manoush Zomorodi.

Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Geiran.

Our audio engineers were Maggie Luthar, Jimmy Keeley, Stacey Abbott and Josephine Nyounai.

Talk to us on Instagram @ManoushZ, and on Facebook or email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.





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Scotta taps Nextail AI powered technology to support retailer’s growth across stores and online — Retail Technology Innovation Hub

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“We’re committed to growing without compromising our values or customer experience. Partnering with Nextail allows us to proactively address operational bottlenecks and bring more precision and agility to our stock decisions. As we grow, it will be even more important to continue delivering on our brand promise of offering high-quality products at a fair price with an authentic story,” says Carlos Serra, Scotta CEO.

By leveraging Nextail, Scotta aims to boost sell-through and margins, reduce markdowns and stockouts, and improve strategic collaboration across teams through data driven insights and automation.

“Growing brands like Scotta prove that forward thinkers don’t need to wait to operate like larger industry leaders,” says Carlos Miragall, CEO and Co-Founder at Nextail. “By choosing to tackle key inventory challenges early on, they’re setting the foundation for sustainable and efficient growth, and we’re proud to be part of that story.”

RTIH AI in Retail Awards

RTIH, organiser of the industry leading RTIH Innovation Awards, proudly brings you the first edition of the RTIH AI in Retail Awards, which is now open for entries. 

As we witness a digital transformation revolution across all channels, AI tools are reshaping the omnichannel game, from personalising customer experiences to optimising inventory, uncovering insights into consumer behaviour, and enhancing the human element of retailers’ businesses.

With 2025 set to be the year when AI and especially gen AI shake off the ‘heavily hyped’ tag and become embedded in retail business processes, our newly launched awards celebrate global technology innovation in a fast moving omnichannel world and the resulting benefits for retailers, shoppers and employees.

Our 2025 winners will be those companies who not only recognise the potential of AI, but also make it usable in everyday work – resulting in more efficiency and innovation in all areas.

Winners will be announced at an evening event at The Barbican in Central London on Wednesday, 3rd September.  



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