There is a world in which gen­er­a­tive AI, as a pow­erful pre­dic­tive research tool and a per­former of tedious tasks, could indeed be mar­shalled to ben­efit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these tech­nolo­gies would need to be deployed inside a vastly dif­ferent eco­nomic and social order than our own, one that had as its pur­pose the meeting of human needs and the pro­tec­tion of the plan­e­tary sys­tems that sup­port all life.
And as those of us who are not cur­rently trip­ping well under­stand, our cur­rent system is nothing like that. Rather, it is built to max­i­mize the extrac­tion of wealth and profit – from both humans and the nat­ural world – a reality that has brought us to what we might think of it as cap­i­talism’s techno-necro stage. In that reality of hyper-con­cen­trated power and wealth, AI – far from living up to all those utopian hal­lu­ci­na­tions – is much more likely to become a fear­some tool of fur­ther dis­pos­ses­sion and despoila­tion.
I’ll dig into why that is so. But first, it’s helpful to think about the pur­pose the utopian hal­lu­ci­na­tions about AI are serving. What work are these benev­o­lent sto­ries doing in the cul­ture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypoth­esis: they are the pow­erful and enticing cover sto­ries for what may turn out to be the largest and most con­se­quen­tial theft in human his­tory. Because what we are wit­nessing is the wealth­iest com­pa­nies in his­tory (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) uni­lat­er­ally seizing the sum total of human knowl­edge that exists in dig­ital, scra­pable form and walling it off inside pro­pri­etary prod­ucts, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose life­time of labor trained the machines without giving per­mis­sion or con­sent.

The past year of Covid-19 has taught us that it is the behaviour of gov­ern­ments, more than the behaviour of the virus or indi­vid­uals, that shapes coun­tries’ expe­ri­ence of the crisis. Talking about pan­demic waves has given the virus far too much agency: until quite recently the apparent waves of infec­tion were driven by gov­ern­ment action and inac­tion. It is only now with the emer­gence of more infec­tious vari­ants that it might be appro­priate to talk about a true second wave.
As gov­ern­ments draw up their battle plans for year two, we might expect them to base their strate­gies on the wealth of data about what works best. And the evi­dence to date sug­gests that coun­tries pur­suing elim­i­na­tion of Covid-19 are per­forming much better than those trying to sup­press the virus. Aiming for zero-Covid is pro­ducing more pos­i­tive results than trying to “live with the virus”.

The British street artist Banksy has financed a boat to rescue refugees attempting to reach Europe from north Africa, the Guardian can reveal.
The vessel, named Louise Michel after a French fem­i­nist anar­chist, set off in secrecy on 18 August from the Spanish sea­port of Burriana, near Valencia, and is now in the cen­tral Mediterranean where on Thursday it res­cued 89 people in dis­tress, including 14 women and four chil­dren.
It is now looking for a safe sea­port to dis­em­bark the pas­sen­gers or to transfer them to a European coast­guard vessel.