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Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
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Arundhati Roy’s 15 October 2026 essay argues that artificial intelligence is concentrating economic and political power while damaging human creativity, work, language and social trust. She says generative AI has unsettled education and publishing by making authorship harder to verify, and she describes Anthropic’s use of her books without permission to train large language models; she received a proposed class-action settlement offering several thousand dollars per title. Roy contrasts AI-industry warnings of existential risk with whistleblowers’ concerns about military uses, environmental costs, labour exploitation and algorithmic bias. She cites Meredith Whittaker’s 2019 resignation from Google over machine-vision work for US drones and Timnit Gebru’s 2020 firing after research on large language models’ environmental and social harms. Roy argues that major AI companies’ calls for regulation could entrench dominant firms by tying them more closely to state security systems and limiting smaller competitors. Roy also warns that data centres require large amounts of land, water and energy, citing planned facilities in Visakhapatnam, India, including a $15 billion Google hub. She says low-paid workers provide data and perform work that can train systems intended to automate their jobs. Her essay calls AI-driven extraction of cultural works, human data and natural resources a new form of colonisation and urges resistance rather than relying only on regulation.
Summary from equator.org.
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The thread spent less time on the article’s headline than on whether its apocalyptic, literary treatment of AI clarified anything. Several readers found the piece bracing: it captured the feeling that AI, automation, militarization, oligarchic ownership, and ecological extraction are converging into a system that treats people as fuel or leftovers. The strongest sympathetic comments extended that fear into a civilizational one, imagining artificial life as a possible great filter or capitalism as a process through which an AI-like machine assembles itself. Others rejected both the prose and the politics. They saw a collage of fashionable AI anxieties, news references, and mystical accelerationist imagery rather than a serious causal argument. Defenders of market economies argued that capitalism has delivered abundance, rapid access to goods, and technologies that materially aid Ukraine; handing powerful AI to overtly authoritarian states would hardly be safer. Even some critics of capitalism narrowed the issue to ownership and distribution: automation could free people from work, but only if its gains do not concentrate with AI owners. Readers also worried that AI is already being used for political manipulation, while a few argued the article’s alarmism mistakes one economic arrangement for an unavoidable technological destiny.
The sharpest fight was whether capitalist control makes AI uniquely dangerous. Critics argued that concentrated ownership turns automation, surveillance, weapons, and resource extraction into a machine that outruns human welfare; defenders replied that market-driven innovation has produced real prosperity and that authoritarian control of AI would be far more frightening. A middle position held that the decisive question is not capitalism as a label but who owns, regulates, and receives the benefits of AI.
- Praise: Market-driven technological progress is credited with making advanced tools broadly available and even helping a smaller Ukraine counter a much larger military power.
- Praise: Automation could buy society vastly more leisure if AI productivity gains are shared rather than captured by the firms and elites owning the systems.
- Praise: Several readers found the article’s stark AI imagery valuable because it forces attention onto the human costs hidden behind glossy promises of progress.
- Praise: AI ownership is treated as the real democratic fault line: broad access and accountable governance matter more than simplistic economic labels.
- Concern: The article’s AI argument struck skeptics as a breathless feed of headlines and apocalypse metaphors, with too little analysis connecting claims to evidence.
- Concern: Commenters fear concentrated AI ownership will turn automation’s bounty into oligarchic power, leaving ordinary people without either control or a fair share of the gains.
- Concern: Political manipulation through social platforms and AI is already presented as evidence that supposedly free-market AI can serve authoritarian ends.
- Concern: Some readers see unchecked AI development as a civilizational gamble, where artificial systems, weapons, and extractive infrastructure could make human survival secondary.