The rich may be hoarding knowledge as much as they hoard money
I had temporary access to information that shows me at a glance which companies are likely to beat their earnings or miss their earnings, which companies are losing customers to which other companies, or the trend of spending at a particular company among people in a particular income group or particular geography, etc. This information is very very current. It can be seen as a dashboard, screener, heat maps, deep dive, I’m sure there’s much more. I think a subscription is equivalent to paying a mortgage. Billionaires have people who manage their money who have access to these kind of reports. Knowledge in advance makes their game hopelessly rigged, just as having the money to pay the lobbyists and buy the congressman makes our tax structure and economy, hopelessly rigged.
Meanwhile, in science, we see federal government bodies hushed up and then being disassembled, well, while government data is probably being sucked through a giant pipeline by acolytes of Peter Thiel. Publicly available data is disappearing, while storehouses of private data are being built, with the help of tax breaks the GOP is handing out like candy, even retroactively, and incidentally, they will be powered by powerplants built partially at taxpayer expense. I believe in many cases that deals negotiated by the companies with states and communities also waive tax payments for a number of years, ironically on the electricity, but that’s another story.
The science data that was telling us just how fast global warming was occurring or just how much damage it will do to our agriculture industries is probably being taken very seriously by those who pretend not to believe in it.
With all of this pending doom, the masses might well look around for a solution and identify the ultra rich as a source of resources. If the ultrarich believe we are headed for a dystopian, desperate hungry, hot world, doesn’t it make sense that they want to pour trillions of dollars into AI to more effectively collect and organize knowledge from the individual people who have it, knowledge about systems that are in place to carry out work, and detailed knowledge about any citizen attempts to weaken the death grip that those same ultra rich have on our government?
The TechnoBrats believe they might be blamed, held accountable, or just simply heavily taxed, all of which they find offensive or scary. Doesn’t it make sense they would want to reorganize society back into a more hierarchical structure of patriarchal families, to push women back into the home, and leave each family to fend for itself in the event of climate, disasters, job, loss, starvation, etc.?
Maybe they want the whole economy to be gig workers, except for maybe top leadership. So investing to collect detailed knowledge of processes, “tribal knowledge”, understanding of codes behind programs, scientific and social data, all available through AI,. and AI agents taking actions previously done by humans such as customer interaction, planning, placing orders, diagnosing, reading, scans, teaching — these things can enable a semblance of society to keep functioning with fewer and fewer workers. They still need some humans, but they may just want us all to pop in like contractors, compete for the privilege of doing some work, and earn no benefits or security. People will be largely replaceable cogs that bridge the gaps between “AI agents”.
If you want to understand the world around you, you may have to pay a big price for the privilege of accessing the truth. The rest of us will just be victims.
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