On January 22, Donald Trump announced plans to award $500 billion for "private sector AI" infrastructure. Five days later, Chinese startup DeepSeek announced a program that appeared to outperform many existing generative AI tools despite investing orders of magnitude less.
AI investors rushed to call this a "Sputnik moment," insisting that this was a signal that the United States needs massive national investments into a technology that has already consumed hundreds of billions and is drawing so much energy that whole power plants have been dedicated to its operation.
And sure, this is exactly like the U.S. response to Sputnik .... if that response was a bunch of billionaires wanking around with a failed technology in a desperate attempt to throw off their dependence on a human labor force.
The very best of these generative AI systemsâin addition to being based on information stolen from human authors and artistsâis still completely unreliable. Take for example, Google's Bard trying to answer this simple question.
The response certainly looks reasonable. However, if you change one word and ask Google when SpaceX was awarded its first NASA contract, the date changes from 2008 to 2006. Change another word, and you're told it was for a completely different program.*
All of these prompts appear to be asking the same thing to a human, but Google's AI isn't human. And it's certainly not something that anyone, from first graders to business leaders, can count on as a reliable source. Google has spent over $30 billion to get simple answers simply wrong.
Google expects to plow at least $100 billion into this system. Microsoft spent $15 billion in a quarter. Mark Zuckerberg recently told investors that Meta expects to blow through $40 billion this year. Quasi non-profit OpenAI has a burn rate approaching $6 billion a year and expects to grow that to nearly $40 billion a year. Corporate IT departments have been investing billions more as they attempt to integrate generative AI technology, despite a very high rate of failure.
But despite these massive investments and indications that false answers and "hallucinations" may be an inevitable result of the design of these systems, the CEOs of AI companies are standing in front of Trump asking for public money to pay their bills. That includes paying for keeping old, outdated power plants operating, and building new ones, entirely to power acres of screaming AI data farms.
Because if we lose the AI race ... something, something, something.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmitt insists that pouring money and energy into generative AI is more important than anything, even saving the planet. And we can't risk slowing down by attempting to reduce the demands in energy and water.
As Mashable reported last fall:
Appearing at a recent Washington AI summit, Schmidt argued that current climate goals should be abandoned in favor of a no-bars-held approach to AI investment. "All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology," said Schmidt, referring to recent efforts to make AI more environmentally friendly. "We may make mistakes with respect to how it's used, but I can assure you that we're not going to get there through conservation."
Billionaires are telling us that we have to invest a huge slab of public money into a technology they've been unable to perfect despite hundreds of billions already invested. And they're insisting that it is such an emergency, that we can't take the time to look at the environmental cost or concerns over how this technology may disrupt our society.
They have to have it. They have to have it now. And you have to pay for it.
Why is that?
I'm going to tell you the story of the 2024 electionâbut it's not the story you know. This story begins in March of 2023 when President Joe Biden made a little proposal.
The âbillionaire minimum income taxâ calls for a 20% levy on households with a net worth of more than $100 million, affecting the top 0.01% of earners, according to a White House fact sheet.
This call for a minimum tax on the wealthiest of the wealthy was renewed in Biden's State of the Union address. âNo billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse,â Biden said during that address in March 2024.
That same month, Elon Musk, who supported Biden in 2020, organized a series of breakfasts in Florida for other billionaire tech investors, with Trump stopping by at least once. Musk began auditioning for a role as an advisor to Trump and within two months he had not only endorsed Trump but committed to spending $45 million a month on his campaign.
Why was Musk willing to ultimately invest at least $250 million in seeing Donald Trump reelected? The racism, sexism, and trans-hate certainly provided a bonus. Musk's frustration that the FAA and EPA were slowing his efforts to throw big rockets into the sea was certainly part of it. But the biggest reason is simple. A 2023 estimate showed that Musk would have paid at least $24 billion in a single year to meet the requirements of Biden's proposed tax.
It's not hard to understand the pitch that Musk made to his fellow billionaires when they gathered for a father-son breakfast including Donald and Baron Trump. If Biden wins, not only will the government stand in the way of our god-given right as billionaires to do whatever the hell we please, he'll also take a portion of our billions and spend it on ... feeding people, providing homes, improving infrastructure, expanding education, and lowering the cost of health care. We can't have that.
Billionaires backed Trump then, and are backing him now, because a little flattery and what amounts to relative pocket change is all it takes to keep them safe from both taxes and regulation. Musk's $417 billion net worth minus the $250 million he spent on Trump is still $417 billion. It's barely worth counting.
That the members of the tech broligarchy are willing to dig around in their bubble gum fund to toss Trump a shiny nickel is hardly surprising. That they also want him to give them billions of dollars in public funds to build their entirely private tech projects is even less surprising.
But now we're back to where we started: Why AI? Why is this thing that creates text and art from the sliced and diced remains of illegally stolen material so important to them?
They care because, while Joe Biden may be safely packed away, billionaires still worry that they are vulnerable to two things:
- Their dependence on human labor to create and sustain their wealth.
- Genuinely independent and accurate reporting that could enrage those humans enough to threaten that wealth.
Putting it another way: Billionaires need you. You don't need billionaires. And they can't afford for you to realize just how much that's true.
They're counting on AI and robotics to solve both those problems. It's hard to put it any more bluntly than the stated goal of OpenAI: "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work." They're not exactly hiding the plot.
First, even before it becomes remotely worthwhile for any real-world use, AI is already fully engaged in flooding the zone to make reliable, human-authored journalism much more difficult to find.
Gannet, the largest newspaper company in the U.S., began using AI tools to generate short stories without human intervention two years ago. UK news sources started cranking out AI-written stories around the same time. Other news sources around the world are advertising for "AI-assisted" journalists and making experience with AI a part of their job requirements. Many news agencies are using tools such as "AI Journalist," a program that patches together stories from fragments found on other outlets.
Magazines have laid off their writing staff and replaced them with AI. Social media is overrun with hundreds of millions of AI chatbots, many of them with profiles and images also generated using AI. There are entire "news sites" that consist entirely of AI-generated stories, some of which are entirely hallucinated.
Many of these AI sources act to reinforce statements of the powerful. Do Musk and Trump have millions of online followers? Maybe. What's certain is that whenever they issue any online statement, it will be immediately repeated, remixed, and regurgitated by millions of AI chatbots who are there to increase the impact of their statements.
Oh, and how many articles did you encounter in major national newspapers and broadcast news sources stating that billionaires were investing heavily for Trump specifically because Biden was coming after their wealth? Might that be ... none?
In addition to amplifying voices already turned up to 11, the chatbots and AI journalists have another important job: obscuring information. If the noise level is high enough, you can't hear them looting the country. And you can't understand how this can all be stopped by a single means that's as simple as putting a stake through a vampire's heart. It's just plain old fair rates of taxation. That's all it takes.
Want to halt the growing income disparity, bust the huge political influence of billionaires, get the funds needed to renew America's schools and infrastructure, and secure Social Security and Medicare for the future? Tax. The. Wealthy.
No, that's not going to happen with Trump in the White House and Republicans running Congress.
Yes, it's the single unifying theme that should be at the heart of the campaign to replace them all.
In the meantime, there is something else that can be done â labor action. That means expanding organized labor, making more demands, and being willing to make the same kind of bold stands that broke through the concentrations of wealth that last time it was anything close to this bad.
Labor. and supporters of labor, understand just what that may mean. The last time it was necessary to confront this kind of concentration of wealth and power, workers were forced into a face-off with thousands of armed goons. In the most infamous case, the U.S. government used the National Guard, bombers from the Army Air Corps, and over one million rounds of ammunition to assault striking workers.
But there's another factor this time around. Billionaires aren't just trying to keep their workforce free of union employees. They want to make it free of employees.
That's where the massive drive for AI comes in. It's also why there is a simultaneous push by many companies to build humanoid robots.
As almost any robotics expert will tell you, human-shaped robots are a bad solution to almost every problem. If you've ever seen an industrial robot at work on an assembly line, you've surely observed that they don't have any resemblance to a human worker. If you happen to have a robot vacuum cleaner, you've probably noticed that it looks more like an apartment-bound horseshoe crab than Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons.
Humanoid robots are, by almost any measure, a terrible solution. But there is one thing that makes them hugely attractive to the billionaire class: All the existing factories and infrastructure are designed to fit humans. By building robots with the same design, they create a 1-to-1 drop-in replacement for human beings. They might not be the most efficient, or the safest, but humanoid robots are the fastest way to directly remove human workers from the labor force.
That's the plan. They don't need AI to be perfect and they don't need humanoid robots to be Sci Fi movie monsters. They just need the combination to be good enough to allow them to escort the humans off the premises.
Billionaires think that if they make this one big push, they can break the connection between human labor and wealth. That's a goal they're willing to devote a lot of their money to achieveâand they're anxious to spend even more of yours.
Pushing down the value of labor relative to capital has been a long-standing obsession of the wealthy, one that has badly warped tax policies around the world. The fight against expanding automation has also been part of every labor movement since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Now the goal is to carry those fights to their logical conclusion. And they want to do it fast, before the remaining 99.99% of the population has a chance to organize against them.
If Joe Biden hadn't moved to tax the super-wealthy, maybe Musk et. al. would have sat on their hands through another election. After all, the status quo was just so ... quo. It's allowed billionaires to steadily increase their portion of the national wealth since Ronald Reagan first destroyed effective taxation in the 1980s.
But Biden moved. The threat wasn't just that billionaires would lose a fraction of their billions; it was that they might lose this opportunity to quash anyone who wanted to head off their continued accumulation of power.
So they moved in response. And now the ability of a handful of ultra-wealthy men to smash democracy is clear.
America's problems boil down to the fact that too much wealth and power are in the hands of too few people. The answer is to take it.
They know that. It's that idea that frightens them
The only thing that may stop them is that, in moving to stop Biden's wealth tax, they may have moved too soon. Labor still represents the base of their wealth. Real journalism still exists. But both need to move quickly.
*For those interested in the actual answer to the SpaceX question, NASA awarded SpaceX a $278 million contract for three flights under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contracts in September 2006, before the first successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon-1 rocket. NASA and DARPA also paid for the first three launches of Falcon 1 which contained several small satellites that were lost when the launches failed. Finally, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract for flights to the ISS in 2008, shortly after SpaceX's first successful launch of the Falcon 1, over the protests of other potential launch providers.
The original 2006 contract was awarded after SpaceX protested a 2004 single-source contract with Kistler Aerospace, which was also developing a reusable rocket. Following the loss of the contract, Kistler was unable to raise enough funding to build the K-1 rocket and eventually failed.
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