499
AI Could Be the Most Effective Tool for Dismantling Democracy Ever Invented
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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I think rejecting AI is a mistake. All that does is allow fascists to have mastery of the tools. Like money, guns, media, food, oil, or any number of other influential things, you don't want a select few people to have sole control over them.
Instead, we should adopt AI and make it work towards many good ends for the everyday person. For example, we can someday have AI that can be effective and cheap lawyers. This would allow small companies to oppose the likes of Disney in court, or for black dudes to successfully argue their innocence in court against cops. AI, like any tool, reflects the intent of their user.
It would be like a military rejecting gunpowder weapons. Except this weapon is mass mind control. There is no letting go of the horns of that bull.
If we do military comparisons, an air carrier is no good for a country without global logistics in place. A fighter jet is no good for a country all whose possible takeoff sites are under fire control. A big-big naval cannon is no good if it's not mounted on a ship, limited by terrain and can be just walked around.
Some weapons give clear advantage to one of the sides, but none to another.
Maybe these tools are good for building scrapers that can structure unstructured data. Turning Facebook or Reddit into something NNTP-accessable, for example. Or making XMPP and Matrix transports to services that don't have stable/open APIs, purely using webpages. For returning interoperability.
They are using generally same UI approaches, modern horrible ones, so one can have a few stages of training, first to recognize which actions are available from the UI and which processes and APIs they invoke, and then train for association of that with a typical NNTP or XMPP or Matrix set. Like - list of contacts, status of a contact, message arrived, send message, upload something. Or for NNTP - list available groups, post something, fetch posts. Associating names with Facebook identifiers. That being divided at least into passing authentication and then the actual service.
That can be a good thing. Would probably work like shit, like something from the Expanse or even old cyberpunk.
You probably want to hear cory doctorow at defcon 32 if you haven't already