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Peter Jones's avatar

That's the trouble with Didn't Earn Its..... they have no idea.

Trump and Musk have never done the work...

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Nigel P. Daly's avatar

Thanks for the though-provoking piece.

Government by Grok echoes Harari's warning that AI-driven automation risks concentrating power in the hands of elites. This will obsviously enable unprecedented surveillance and control and in so doing undermine democratic institutions.

Musk’s drive for factory-like efficiency and automation as applied to governance means stripping bureaucracy down to its algorithmic core while consolidating authority under tech oligarchs. On the one hand, this move will sure create efficiency gains, cost savings, and in many public facing sectors, improved service (!), but the coin flips between techno-optimism and techno-fascism. What fuels Musk’s talent for automation also enables AI-powered political control. Here efficiency is an attractive mask hiding authoritarian rule.

Parallels to the CCP’s surveillance state are hard to ignore. Both the US's emerging regime and the CCP increasingly rely on AI to tighten control, suppress dissent, and optimize governance through mass data collection and predictive enforcement.

Keep up the insightful and pressing reporting and commentary!

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Cheers Nigel — and I think that's true; what's coming out of DOGE and the Trump White House is increasingly authoritarian in bent, and Musk is providing the tools and the framework to justify and carry out a lot of it. Appreciate the comments, and the kind words — will do.

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VITA's avatar

We are in for a mass disaster, intentional or unintentional. Setting aside whether AI might have decision-making advantages, it absolutely does not currently have an advantage in identifying known unknowns and gathering reliable and up-to-date information. When the people who have all the power have none of the relevant information, horrible things happen. Either there will be a serious security failure or a misdirected effort disaster like the many during USSR and China's industrialization.

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Starting to feel that way, isn't it

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Michael Spencer's avatar

It feels like surveillance capitalism will be spilling over into democracy sometime very soon. Call me when the layoffs to military personnel and national Defense employees begins. Great for Pantir and similar companies I am sure.

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Seriously, that's just what is unignorable throughout all this right? It may seem ridiculous to spend $72,000 to promote mental health awareness in Zambia or whatever folks are worked up about, but the sum total of all these USAID programs amount to like 3 F-15s.

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Nurse Dan's avatar

Thank you, for this information.

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Tim Morgan's avatar

Musk & the Techbro Oligarchy are pwning the government. They are doing it to block us from using open automation to free us from their control: https://www.apf.org/emerging-fellows-alumni-blog/who-owns-an-automated-society%3F

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Brian Merchant's avatar

Funny how the promise of automation so rarely actually gets realized by the workers who could use it best!

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Gillian Rosheuvel's avatar

So, Move Fast and Break Things: Government Edition. I'm sure this will end well.

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The Best's avatar

I KNEW Musk was going to try to replace government with Grok!

Its a slippery slope from GovCloud on AWS to The Fed on Grok.

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Pimento Mori's avatar

I feel like the definition of small government has really changed over the last few weeks for politicians, but not most Americans, although they would prefer we believe it has.

https://open.substack.com/pub/pimentomori/p/america-dont-worry-about-big-brother?r=5783cf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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