AI: The New Engine of Control
Everybody’s singing the AI song like it’s harmless new pop. I don’t hear a tune — I hear an alarm. AI isn’t just another gadget. Left unchecked it becomes the perfect tool for control: faster, cheaper, and far more invasive than any propaganda machine of the past. Autocrats already use it to monitor, repress, and silence dissent; that’s not a dystopian prediction, it’s happening now. (Journal of Democracy)
Imagine a ruler who can know everything you wrote, where you went, who you met, and what you said — a ruler who can flag you as “bad” with an algorithm and make that judgment stick. If you think dictators like Hitler or Stalin would’ve loved this technology, you’re not wrong: history shows authoritarian regimes eagerly reach for better tools of surveillance and social control. AI hands them a power multiplier. (Journal of Democracy)
This isn’t hypothetical geography-class history. Look at today’s examples: China runs hundreds of millions of cameras and increasingly ties them to facial-recognition and profiling systems — roughly a camera for every two people, by some estimates. (Wikipedia) Iran and other repressive states are already using digital tools — apps, cameras, and even AI-assisted monitoring — to enforce dress codes and control women’s lives. (The Guardian) Russia’s digital apparatus likewise tightens control and tracks citizens in ways that chill speech and protest. (Los Angeles Times)
We’re not just talking about cameras. Combine corporate data, phone tracking, facial recognition, predictive algorithms, and censorship tools — and you get an automated system that can flag, isolate, and punish people at scale. The war on free speech has started; AI will make it routine, invisible, and harder to fight. (Journal of Democracy)
And if you’re wondering what a “King Trump” with access to these tools might do — look at how surveillance and suppression already operate elsewhere. This technology won’t create tyranny by itself, but it will make repression faster, cheaper, and more efficient for whoever controls it. Tracking your car, reading your posts, mapping your contacts — these are no longer sci-fi scenarios. They’re the next frontier of control. (Wikipedia)
If we care about freedom, we should stop treating AI as neutral tech and start treating it like the political force it already is: a tool that can champion liberty or crush it, depending on who holds the levers. The choice is political — and we’re running out of time to make it.
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