Microsoft, Amazon, and Google (among other mega corporations) are currently spending unprecedented sums of money to build out massive data centers in preparation for the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. And harvesting your data is only the beginning.
Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life reveals that powerful multinational tech companies are already weaponizing AI and rapidly ratcheting up “generative” AI tools, which have the power to extinguish what remains of the free market.
The book warns how the AI revolution could push Americans into a socialist dystopia. This will happen via mass layoffs which, in turn, will lead to a meager welfare check called a “universal basic income.” The Controligarchs’ end goal? Total control over you via a China-style social-credit-score system.
This may sound hyperbolic, but consider the following:
Last Friday, the board of the most prominent AI toolmaker, OpenAI, fired CEO Sam Altman for not being “consistently candid.” Altman’s lack of candor risked the ChatGPT maker’s ability to act responsibly, the board said. But Altman was not unemployed for long. He was swiftly hired by OpenAI’s largest investor: Microsoft.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at an event in Seoul, South Korea, on June 9, 2023. (SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
With its hire of Altman, Microsoft is poised to make a great leap forward in the AI arena. If anyone knows the direction that AI is headed, it is Altman. He turned OpenAI into an almost $90 billion company almost overnight and has received praise from corporate titans like Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, who called Altman “a hero of mine.”
Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can’t wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it’s going to be simply incredible. Thank you…
— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) November 17, 2023
So, where is AI headed? “A lot of people working on AI pretend that it’s only going to be good; it’s only going to be a supplement; no one is ever going to be replaced,” Altman told The Atlantic magazine in July, adding: “Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop.”
Estimates for the number of jobs that AI will replace vary wildly, but most estimates are startling. Venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, who worked with both Microsoft and Google on their competing AI projects, told CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2019 that around 40 percent of jobs worldwide are at risk within fifteen years. According to Lee, AI will change the world “more than anything in the history of mankind…more than electricity.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (right) and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speak at an OpenAI DevDay event on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In March, another AI expert doubled Lee’s estimate, boasting that job losses caused by AI could top 80 percent. Job losses are a good thing, according to SingularityNET founder and CEO, Ben Goertzel. Goertzel helped popularize the term Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and told AFP, “I don’t think [that AI-driven unemployment is] a threat. I think it’s a benefit.” How so? “People can find better things to do with their life than work for a living,” Goertzel says. Not very reassuring.
Surely, it is no coincidence that OpenAI has been funding universal (or unconditional) basic income (UBI) studies including, according to Altman, “maybe the largest and most comprehensive” UBI study in the world. Unfortunately, the results will not be available until 2024. But for now, it’s full speed ahead.
In July, when he was still running OpenAI, Altman launched a UBI-related crypto project called “Worldcoin.” The primary objective of the project is to create a “World ID” which the company has described as a “digital passport” to separate real humans from fake AI robots. To obtain your OpenAI World ID, Worldcoin will require you to do an in-person scan of your eye (just the iris, not the full eyeball) using its “orb.”
The website for Worldcoin, the digital identity and crypto payments project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is displayed on a smartphone. (Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
More than two million beta users have signed up to have their irises scanned using Worldcoin’s silver bowling-ball-sized orb. Reuters reported that “Worldcoin is scaling up ‘orbing’ operations to 35 cities in 20 countries.” Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations, and others announced earlier this month at an event titled “50-in-5” that digital ID programs would be rolling out to fifty countries within five years.
Controligarchs blows the lid off the tyrannical push for mandatory digital IDs. The book reveals how digital IDs combined with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will amount to a de facto social-credit-score system as used in Communist China. And, in addition to other Controligarch offerings such as virtual reality (VR) porn and maggot milkshakes, a UBI will be your only consolation in this increasingly dystopian present.
In the past, Bill Gates has dismissed calls for UBI, stating in 2017 that the U.S. is not “rich enough” for the government to write welfare checks to everyone. In 2019, he echoed the previous statement, writing that “we still need people to work to produce the goods and services of society…we are not rich enough to give up work incentives.” Perhaps Altman can change Gates’s mind.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates leaves a closed-door “AI Insight Forum” on Capitol Hill on September 13, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
UBI has been hailed by some as a “dividend” paid to workers facing imminent unemployment for their role in developing and disseminating the AI technologies. When you use ChatGPT and other AI language and image modeling tools, you are quite literally training your replacement.
If you think that the world will surely band together and protest this impending hellscape, think again. One programmer in OpenAI’s developer community pitched an idea for how humans can earn their keep in the not-so-distant future: “Essentially technology creates a REAL universal basic income for anyone willing to volunteer their DNA as their form contribution.” Shockingly, the proposal was not dismissed outright. “I think you are making perfect sense,” an OpenAI community member replied.
But not everyone agreed that selling their DNA data is a solution. “Just no. Feels incredibly creepy. Sorry,” an AI development firm executive wrote.
A protestor holds up a banner warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence during OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s visit to The Cambridge Union on November 1, 2023, in Cambridge, England. (Nordin Catic/Getty Images For The Cambridge Union)
Nonetheless, Microsoft has already filed a patent for a microchip that can be placed above or below the skin to facilitate buying and selling future goods. The Microsoft patent (called “patent 666” by conspiracy theorists, according to Snopes) allows gumptious individuals to earn cryptocurrency in exchange for their biometric data and performing monotonous activities like watching advertisements.
As the AI arms race hurtles us all toward oblivion, many Americans facing potential job loss might be wondering, how much UBI will I be receiving? Sam Altman predicts around $13,500 for “each of the 250 million adults in America,” according to his famous blog post titled “Moore’s Law for Everything.”
Now, $13,500 per month is not bad, you might be thinking. Sorry, no, that’s only $13,500 per year!
Seamus Bruner is the author of Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life and Peter Schweizer’s Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute. Follow him @SeamusBruner