AI is possibly the real and formidable adversary of the billionaires and the privileged class.
They had ruled society, the multitude, for ages by physical force. When revolution after revolution, Bastille, American Revolution etc., rendered physical force impractical or even a Trojan horse as the multitude possessed more physical power, the privileged class turned to information as a tool, or rather made information the exclusive tool, to maintain their seat on the Upper or Superior Mat, like the Vietnamese like to say, and colonize the rest of society.
To gain an advantage, information needs to be developed or gathered. More importantly, the information must be kept secret. That is what the privileged class has been doing – to keep information from ordinary people and keep them from being equal.
The technical or special knowledge is of course possessed by the experts: how to build an airplane, why the water on Santa Monica beach sometimes should be avoided, etc. Ordinary people don’t need or want to know, but the information is available and readily accessible.
Other information that are important and the public is entitled to know as they affect their life, however, have been deliberately kept from them: Who killed President John F. Kennedy; or who is included in the Epstein infamous list; or why Boeing, the company that produced the flawed 737 aircrafts that by 2024 experienced 234 aircraft losses, 529 accidents, and 5779 fatalities got $4.2B from the U.S. Government to develop a space vehicle and an extraordinarily successful company, SpaceX, was awarded only $2.6B to do the same thing; or why huge amounts of money always go to already wealthy zillionaires, and ordinary folks continue to struggle to pay exorbitantly-priced gasoline to take their children to school, etc.
AI has cleared the field and made information readily accessible to the public to the point where in a few minutes talking to AI, a Joe would conceivably be able to know about most of everything that a billionaire knows. No knowledge would be special knowledge reserved for billionaires. And that is a clear and eminent danger to the billionaires and the ruling class and that is why they don’t want to regulate AI, as anything regulated will become public information accessible to ordinary people.
AI would make life’s problems simpler and easier to understand, and questions could be answered quickly.
One party could feed to AI such questions as how can I cheat my opponent to win this election? The opponent in turn asks would the election system present any flaws that a cheater could exploit? Were the above-mentioned questions answered truthfully, there would be no rampant accusations of fraud, cheat, or steal flying around to muddy the political atmosphere for the advantage of one party or another.
There is now a tug-of-war between two factions: AI should or should not be regulated.
Ordinary people of course want it to be regulated. Keeping it unregulated means to keep the multitude away from it and reserve it for the billionaires as their exclusive privilege. It is conceivable that a regulated AI would answer these above-mentioned questions honestly, but unregulated AI companies controlled by billionaires would not allow their AI to answer questions they don’t like.
It has been said that the Human Brain is God. The tech billionaires have proved beyond doubt that their brains are scarily superior. It was Archimedes who declared that “Give me a stand, and I will move the earth”. AI clearly gives the proverbial stand to the tech billionaires who will certainly become an omnipotent God to control the earth and soon the Universe.
So, the choice for us, when we are still able to choose, is AI as an equalizer rather than an AI providing a stand for the billionaires to conduct themselves as God.
JOHN P. LE PHONG (This article appears on thelephongjournal.com, Facebook, and X)
