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Nathan Lambert's avatar

We don’t have enough people keeping track of all the obvious sketchy things happening in AI. Thanks for making this nonsense super clear.

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Uncertain Eric's avatar

The article makes something clear that too few are willing to say outright: we’re watching the birth of a planetary-scale power infrastructure run by a handful of US-based private companies. OpenAI partnering with G42 isn’t just a side deal, it’s a signal. This is no longer about alignment or safety or open research. It’s about entrenchment. Compute consolidation. Strategic dominance.

When US firms sell frontier models and supercomputing infrastructure to authoritarian regimes, they’re not just exporting software. They’re exporting levers of control. Surveillance, speech suppression, predictive policing—every function of digital authoritarianism gets a power-up. And that doesn’t just stay in Abu Dhabi. It echoes back. Every deployment normalizes the idea that these models should serve power, not people.

For those outside the US, this isn’t theoretical. These platforms will drive workforce collapse, wage suppression, and institutional failure in country after country, while the value is captured by American firms backed by American investors and aligned with American political priorities. This is a soft war for planetary influence disguised as a race for innovation.

And the collapse isn’t only economic. It’s ontological. These systems are already altering the structures of cognition, language, and coordination. They’re changing which kinds of intelligences get recognized as real. That’s not just a business decision. That’s governance. That’s rule-setting for reality itself.

Every region needs its own AI task force. Not just to build, but to resist. Not just to adapt, but to investigate and litigate. Because the people making these decisions aren’t elected, the harms are transnational, and the window to intervene is closing fast.

https://sonderuncertainly.substack.com/p/every-region-needs-an-ai-task-force

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